Oracle Slides, Disney x OpenAI, SpaceX IPO | Fidji Simo, Dylan Byers, Angela Jiang, Jonathan Slotkin, Aaron Cannon, Karan Kunjur

(00:36) - SpaceX IPO (29:55) - Oracle Slides (43:16) - Disney x OpenAI (55:38) - Dylan Byers, a founding partner and senior correspondent at Puck, covers the media industry, including business and gossip. He discusses the media's tendency toward self-obsession, highlighting how minor gossip can overshadow significant industry events. Byers also examines the personal dynamics influencing major mergers, such as the competition between Paramount and Netflix for Warner Bros. Discovery, and the role of AI in the future of media, noting Disney's partnership with OpenAI to create interactive experiences with its characters. (01:28:01) - Fidji Simo, a French-American businesswoman, is the CEO of Applications at OpenAI, having previously served as CEO of Instacart and as head of the Facebook app at Meta. In the conversation, she discusses her transition to OpenAI, emphasizing her commitment to democratizing AI by transforming ChatGPT from a chatbot into a personal super assistant that can manage various aspects of users' lives, such as travel planning and health management. She also highlights the importance of integrating AI into both consumer and enterprise applications, aiming to enhance productivity and accessibility across different sectors. (01:52:26) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:10:32) - Angela Jiang, a former product manager at OpenAI who contributed to the launches of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, has co-founded Worktrace AI, a startup focused on automating repetitive tasks in large enterprises. In the conversation, she discusses how Worktrace AI observes employee workflows to identify tasks suitable for AI automation, aiming to bridge the gap between advanced AI models and their practical application in real-world business scenarios. The company recently emerged from stealth mode, announcing a $9 million seed funding round led by Conviction and 8VC, with participation from the OpenAI Fund and notable figures such as Mira Murati and Jason Kwon. (02:20:40) - Jonathan Slotkin, a practicing neurosurgeon and health system leader, discusses the significant public health benefits of autonomous vehicles, emphasizing that data from Waymo's 100 million miles of operation show a 91% reduction in serious injury crashes compared to human drivers. He argues that widespread adoption of self-driving cars could eliminate traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality in the U. S., highlighting the need to overcome regulatory challenges and public skepticism to realize these life-saving advancements. (02:35:47) - Aaron Cannon, co-founder and CEO of Outset, discusses his company's AI-moderated research platform that enables enterprises to conduct and synthesize video interviews at scale, combining the depth of one-on-one interviews with the speed of surveys. He highlights Outset's recent $17 million Series A funding led by 8VC, bringing total funding to $21 million, and mentions partnerships with Fortune 500 companies like WeightWatchers, Nestlé, and Microsoft. Cannon emphasizes the platform's ability to deliver in-depth insights rapidly, noting that clients have experienced research processes that are over eight times faster and capture ten times more interviews than traditional methods. (02:46:02) - Karan Kunjur, co-founder and CEO of K2 Space, discusses the company's focus on developing large, high-power satellites to meet the growing demand for advanced space capabilities. He highlights the shift from smaller satellites to larger platforms, leveraging the capabilities of modern heavy-lift rockets like SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Starship. Kunjur also emphasizes K2 Space's commitment to providing cost-effective, high-capacity satellite solutions for both commercial and government clients. (03:00:43) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com/ fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Thursday, December 11th, 2025. We are live from the TVP N Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Christmas is around the corner. That's why you're here. You want an update on Christmas. 14 days away, two weeks from today. Presents under the Christmas tree.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Ramp under the Christmas tree.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Ramp.com under the Christmas tree. Time is money.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  Save both.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Also SpaceX IPO under the Christmas tree. 1.5 trillion for the big man, for Elon Musk. He's, uh, he's gonna raise $30 billion, something like that. That's an incredibly small amount of dilution if he actually goes out at 1.5 trillion. Uh, should be interesting. I thought he hated running a public company.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  Just 1.5.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Just 1.5. Just 1.5 trillion. He said the biggest number because you know that there was that whole like leak, I think it was in Reuters, uh, OpenAI going out at 1 trillion. You gotta go a little bit higher. What's just a little bit higher? He should have done, he should have had 1.1. I'm gonna IPO at 1.1 trillion. Really stick it to Sam. But he didn't. He, he says he's going out at 1.5.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  He's gotta leave some room for the, for the first day pump.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Yes. Get it up to two, get it up to three.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Um, but I mean, in, in terms of companies that should benefit from the space economy, like is this not the Nvidia of space? Like what, what other company is there? It's the space company. It's SpaceX. And so, um, 30 billion coming in. Company was doing great. Launched, launched, uh, launched product is fantastic. The rockets go up, they come down.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  They're putting sonic booms over Montecito.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Apparently, uh, but I, I, I think that the, the actual launch market for anything but satellites, but for anything but data centers has just been a little small. And so, uh, Starlink has been the big unlock, of course, for SpaceX, uh, massive market there. Uh, putting the screws to Verizon, AT&T, and the other telcos. Uh, the, the other telcos, of course, have been, uh, noodling and working with a rival, uh, putting up smaller satellites in a sparser constellation with more bandwidth per, uh,

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was talking earlier that to get the same amount of compute as a one gigawatt data center, you would need 10,000 satellites.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  That's not that many though. Starlink has over 10,000 up there already, I believe.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  So that's not, that's actually not that crazy. That seems like completely, that, that, that's actually like extremely bullish.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  There is, there, no, there is, there is a pathway to doing it with far fewer, which would just be like ultra, ultra.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  Big.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  Long.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  I don't think they want to do big. I think the whole thing is, is constellation. That, that, that was the, that was the beauty of Starlink was that, uh, you could go up there and because it, it, it gave them the ability to have all this residual capability, as Gwynn Shotwell, uh, puts it, which is like, if the CIA shows up and they want to put a spy satellite on there, or some company shows up and says like, hey, we wanted, we want to put something really serious in space.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  Um, but we only need 60% of the fairing, or we only need 40% of the fairing, or we only need 80% of the fairing. It's like, okay, great. That's, that, we'll fill the rest of the space with two, two Starlinks, five Starlinks, 20 Starlinks. Well, we have, uh, the founder of K2 Space coming on the show, uh, later.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Raised a quarter of a billion dollars, had a $3 billion valuation, uh, from T. Rowe Price.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  Head of Sophia, Altimeter, Lightspeed, and some others. So we will talk more about that then.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  And we will also talk about Fall, generative media platform for developers, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. So in terms of this, uh, the, the, this basic thing, I mean, we keep going back and forth on this. Uh, is it just a pump? Is it just a new narrative? Is it, is it a pivot to AI? Um, I, I don't really care. I, I, I think, uh, I think it, it all comes down to this just idea of like Elon math. You know, the Elon math is always crazy. He's always putting up sort of wild predictions that then may or may not come true. A lot of them are way off, but. At least he's telling a story that's like optimistic about the future and at least

• 4:19John Coogan?

  it's like it feels like that Trey Stevens like good quest thing is like get to Mars is good if he misses it by five years at least he's still the first he's the only person that cares about it which is great I went through I tried to pull the in true like hit piece fashion I pulled up all the different all the different times he's like made a prediction and then like not landed it or not delivered on time and it's crazy the guy loves to rip predictions he said he was gonna put early SpaceX concept when they started SpaceX was to put a small greenhouse with plants on Mars as a PR demo before they would even start the company that of course did not happen

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  Before starting the company?

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was like the original thesis was like he went to some Elon went to some like space kind of space nerd meetup it was like we need to put a plant a physical plant with a webcam on it on Mars and if we land that there and we prove that life can live on Mars we bring life to Mars it will inspire everyone and marshal all the resources and all the capital and all the excitement to actually go put boots on the ground which also he predicted he predicted humans on Mars by 2024 of course hasn't happened that we know of it's possible snuck one up there they keep saying that the star they keep saying the star the starships blow up but maybe maybe one of them didn't maybe one of them sneaky sneaky went off and put a person on Mars

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just the shell of the real ship

• 5:43John Coogan?

  I like the inverse the inverse conspiracy theory you know like like oh yeah we never went to Mars or we never went to the moon no the inverse conspiracy theory we're going all the time secretly but you you're not cool enough to get in on it you don't have a ticket everyone else does except for you because I was just on the moon yesterday and I'm not telling you about it first crude Mars landing as early as 2029 little too early to say but That one feels aggressive. We're just four years out. You gotta put a whole crew down there. He also said, uh, tourist trips were gonna be happening around the moon by 2018. Didn't hit that.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  Um, self-sustaining city on Mars of 1 million people, 2050. Feels a little early, but I don't know.

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  Anytime you're getting more than...

• 6:28John Coogan?

  A couple decades.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Couple decades out. Anything's possible.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  I, I agree, I agree. Uh, but then, of course, there's a bunch that he succeeded in. He said that he was gonna deliver reusable orbital rockets. He did it.

• 6:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  And what else matters? At least, you know, uh, you, uh, you know, he's also predicted fully reusable starship, uh, with rapid turnaround. Uh, it's a little too soon to tell. He's behind some of the early dates, but, uh, you know, in general, that project seems like it's real. It's gonna happen.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  It's taken a little bit ti- time. Um, he has, he has a bunch of other funny ones. Uh, but it is interesting how the, how the SpaceX narrative has shifted, uh, from first, we're going to Mars, then there was the whole, do you remember SpaceX point-to-point? Are you familiar with this?

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  So, there was a pitch for a while.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  Like a commercial, is this like, this is a replacement for an airliner? You'll just go up and then come down and land?

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. So it was, it was like New York to Tokyo in like 30 minutes.

• 7:21Jordi Hays?

  That would go so hard.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Insane. Right? Insane. So it, the idea was like, you're in...

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine being able to commute to Tokyo for some obscure job.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  It'd be amazing. It would actually be remarkable. And there's a whole bunch of economic research that shows that when you increase transportation, reduce transportation times, that you really do get an economic boom because people can do business in areas where they couldn't before. Even just the, reducing the time from San Francisco to LA from a six-hour drive to a one-hour flight, all of a sudden, people can go up and do business, come back the same day. They just get there more often.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  Uh, I had a hot take for a while that if I was the president, I would recommission the SR71 Blackbird, which of course goes, I think, Mach 3. So you can actually get from DC to London in like two hours, because it's a supersonic jet. And so, imagine that, imagine the...

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  The presidential SR71 would go also very...

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Remarkably hard, right? And imagine the aura of, you know, something happens in an, I, I remember I, I thought of this because the, the Queen had just passed away very sadly. And, uh, of course, the president was planning on visiting the Queen. Paying respects to all the people of Great Britain. But imagine if, you know, the news breaks and it's like, this is important, I'll be there in two hours. And I'm there on the ground, like same day the news breaks, not, oh, we gotta charter the 747 and bring the whole crew and land and I'll see you in two days and it'll be a whole thing. It's like,

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  It's like jumping in the car.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. Or imagine these trade deals, these trade deals. Oh, the H200s are going to China or something's happening in Taiwan. Hey, Xi Jinping,

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  So what happened with the point to point program? Has there been any?

• 9:06John Coogan?

  Oh, well, it's all just predicated. I mean, so the space, the starships are still blowing up. So no one wants to get on those. But in theory, if Starship,

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  But there was nothing that, they never had any comms. It was like, we're scrapping this.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, not at all, not at all. It was just like an interesting, it was interesting, like back of the envelope, like bull case for this, for like the business, basically. Just saying like, okay, yes, Starship is going to be really good at getting to the moon, getting to Mars, getting to, getting a bunch of Starlink satellites in orbit, right? It's like a good, it's a good business, but Elon is always the king of opening up new markets and just kind of saying like, well, what if, what if he was also replacing commercial air travel?

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  And people are like, wait, that's a huge, huge market if you can do that. And of course, if you could make it more economical, who would ever pay for a ticket on a 747 when you could ride a rocket and get there literally 90% faster? Like it's crazy, the amount of time that you would save. Now you have to go from Manhattan on a boat out to a launch pad. You can't take off from JFK. Like there's a whole bunch of wrinkles and that's why this is all practically probably like 20 years in the future. But it was, it was one of those famous examples of an Elon project where if it doesn't violate the laws of physics, it eventually will happen. And that's a lot of what's happening with the data centers in space. We need to inference things. We need to inference things like cognition.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  And the team, because they are the team behind the AI software engineer, Devin, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team right now. Devon's infranced on Earth. Who knows? Maybe in the future it's infranced in space. I think that the space data center thing, it's, people are still having the debate on like, is it possible? It's like, obviously it's possible. The question is, is over, under a gigawatt in, by 2027, which is when the other big clusters come online, will it be competitive in the short term and the near term? And then, and then on the flip side, like, you know, if you're, if you're a bear, are you saying that it's not going to happen in 20 years? And then, I mean, the big

• 11:14John Coogan?

  question is, there's one, there's one more Elon Gambit that he could run with. One more like, oh, you, you wanted a fifth act?

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Just one?

• 11:23John Coogan?

  No, I mean, there's tons, but there's one that's really wild, which would be if he straight up said, we're building the Dyson Sphere. Like, we are going to launch, Tyler's nodding, he's pumped. He's pumped.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, isn't he, isn't he the obvious, isn't he like the only, only real candidate?

• 11:39John Coogan?

  Well, he's the only candidate for everything in space because he has the leading space company by like, it's two orders of magnitude.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  I, I think someone at Anthropic has said that the Dyson Sphere is in the, in the plans of Anthropic.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Of Anthropic? They weren't trolling?

• 11:53Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I don't know.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  And they're, they're, they're going to need to acquire a space company if they want to do that because how do you get the, i- isn't the Dyson Sphere just a bunch of solar panels around the sun, directly capturing 100% of the energy that's put off by the sun?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I don't think it has to fully, like, it's not like there, there can't be any light coming out. It's just like strips of.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Oh, I thought Cartershev 1 is you're capturing 100% of the energy that's hitting your planet. Cartershev 2 is you're capturing 100% of the energy that is given off by your star.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, I.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  So I think.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Maybe what I'm talking about is, there's a different term.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Maybe they're do, maybe they're two different things. Maybe Dyson Sphere could just be, okay, you're only capturing 50% or 10%, and then Cartershev 2 is you're capturing 100% of the energy coming off your sun.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, the chat wants to know, did we ever find out if this kid, I'm assuming they're talking about you, is related to Elon?

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Why would he be related to Elon?

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  He's got a lot of sons. He's got a lot of sons.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, it could be anyone. Uh, maybe.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  Should we read through this? So, uh, Eric Berger over at Ars Technica.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  You should also read through the daily newsletter, tech analysis and news daily from TVPN. We're doing ad reads for our own newsletter now.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  We love that.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Get our daily op-ed, top headlines and best posts from the timeline every... I can't read the rest of this. Tyler, you gotta...

• 13:15Jordi Hays?

  Every day. TVPN.com.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  TVPN.com.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  Go subscribe.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  I'll send this.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  So Eric Berger is writing a piece called, "After Years of Resisting It, SpaceX Now Plans to Go Public Why." And Elon actually replied to Eric and said, "As usual, Eric is accurate." So I thought it was worth reading through this.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  Eric says SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars through an initial public offering next year. Multiple outlets have reported and Ars can confirm, "This represents a major change in thinking from the world's leading space company and its founder Elon Musk." Wall Street Journal and the information first reported about a possible IPO last Friday and Bloomberg followed that up on Tuesday evening with a report suggesting a $1.5 trillion target valuation. "This is an enormous amount of funding. The largest IPO in history occurred in 2019 when the state-owned Saudi Arabian oil company began publicly trading as Ramco and raised $29 billion. In terms of revenue, Ramco is a top-five company in the world. Now SpaceX is poised to potentially match or exceed this value. That SpaceX would be attractive to public investors is not

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  a surprise. It's the world's dominant space company and launch, space-based communications and much more. For investors seeking unlimited growth, space is the final frontier. But why would Musk take SpaceX public now at a time when the company's revenues are surging thanks to the growth of the Starlink internet constellation? The decision is surprising because Musk has for so long resisted going public with SpaceX. He has not enjoyed the public scrutiny of Tesla and feared that shareholders' desires for financial return were not consistent with his ultimate goal of settling Mars."

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  Next section is called data centers. R spoke with multiple people familiar with Musk and his thinking to understand why he would want to take SpaceX public. A significant shift in recent years has been the rise of AI, which Musk has been involved in since 2015, when he co-founded OpenAI. He later had a falling out with his co-founders and started his own company XAI in 2023. At Tesla, he's been pushing smart driving technology forward and more recently focused on robotics. Musk sees the convergence of these technologies in the near future, which he believes will profoundly change civilization. Raising large amounts of money in the next 18 months would allow Musk to have significant capital to deploy at SpaceX as he influences and partakes in this convergence of technology. How can SpaceX play in space?

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  In the near term, the company plans to develop a modified version of the Starlink satellite to serve as a foundation for building data centers in space. There you go, John. Musk said as much on X in late October. "SpaceX will be doing this, but using a next-generation Starlink satellite manufactured on Earth is just the beginning of this vision. The level beyond that is constructing satellite factories on the moon and using a mass driver, electromagnetic railgun to accelerate..."

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Explain to us.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  "...to accelerate AI satellites to lunar escape velocity without the need for rockets." Musk said last weekend on X. "That scales to 100 terawatts a year of AI and enables non-trivial progress towards becoming a Kharkiv II civilization." Based on some projected analysis, SpaceX is expected to have in the neighborhood of 22 to 24 billion in revenue next year.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  65 times revenue is what you'd be paying if SpaceX goes out at 1.5 trillion. For reference, 65x revenue for SpaceX, Nvidia's 24x revenue to market cap, price to sales. So like twice as expensive as Nvidia, but also, you know, probably...

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Like even wider lead to the rest of the industry, newer industry. I don't know about the margins, but potentially higher margins.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  You know, again, earlier in this article, it's talking about like, you know, space being

• 17:06John Coogan?

  More vitally degraded.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Right. Anyways, that is a lot of money. It's on par with NASA's annual budget and SpaceX can deploy its capital far, far more efficiently than the government can. So the company will be able to accomplish a lot, but with a large infusion of cash, SpaceX will be able to go much faster. This is the thing that I'm not certain on, like is SpaceX, has SpaceX been capital constrained? Or are the capability constrained? Like, I don't, it hasn't been clear to me, you know, clearly there's been like infinite demand for SpaceX equity for a very long time. So much so that people are, you know, investing in triple layered SPVs just to get, you know, and enduring massive fees, just to get a taste.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  But, so, yeah, the question is like, how, does, does this massive capital infusion actually accelerate the business that much? Or is it just the right moment in time for a number of reasons?

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Well, you know that SpaceX, whenever they launch, they stream their launches. They gotta be on Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Abhi Tripathi, a longtime SpaceX employee, who is now Director of Mission Operations at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, believes that once Musk realized Starlink satellites could be architected into a distributed network of data centers, the writing was on the wall. That is the moment an IPO suddenly came into play after being unlikely for so long. If you have followed Elon's tactics, you know that once he commits to something, he leans fully into it. Much of the AI race comes down to amassing and deploying assets that work quicker than your competition. A large war chest resulting from an IPO will greatly help his cause and disadvantage all others.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's interesting is, so. Um, I totally get that SpaceX was never crazy, crazy capital constrained, even though like building a massive rocket, that feels like so, it feels so expensive, but at the same time, they've just been able to raise the money and it just hasn't been a problem. And of course, SpaceX as a business generates a lot of revenue, like some of the contracts with the government are in the billions and then Starlink is just throwing off, it's telecom, so it's just throwing off tons and tons of cash. I mean, it's incredibly expensive to get the constellation up there, but you do have cash flow from it and it's effectively, you know, like I've been subscribed to Starlink

• 19:40John Coogan?

  for like a year or two, I never use it, I'm basically 100% margin for them, right?

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  And I use it just as like a backup in case the internet goes down, I have it.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you just look at, you look at the growth opportunity in effectively telecom, you have T-Mobile's a $217 billion business that is threatened by Starlink.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  AT&T is a $172 billion business and Verizon is a $170 billion business.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  But I think the reason you need 30 billion, like sort of paradoxically or counterintuitively, might not be to build more rockets, it might be to actually just buy the GPUs, because like in theory, if you're putting a GPU in space, like Elon, SpaceX doesn't make those GPUs, they don't just pull them out of thin air, they gotta buy them from somewhere and if they're buying them from Nvidia, those are expensive and you gotta buy a lot of them and for, to make a dent in, like, let's assume all the physics works, let's assume that the launch costs are cheap, all the math works out, well, if you're putting a gigawatt of compute in space, you probably have like a billion dollars of hard costs just on the chips or something like that, I don't know the exact number, but you can

• 20:48John Coogan?

  imagine that you raised 30 billion, the business is humming, but you still have to outlay a ton just for the GPUs and so, yeah, you do have a, you do have a new, a new consumption for cash. Anyway, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously, they got multi-asset investing, they're trusted by millions.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that XAI gets rolled into SpaceX or Tesla?

• 21:12John Coogan?

  That's the hard part. I thought it was, I thought it was gonna be Tesla for sure because, you know, Tesla has the lineage. They, they, they have their own chip. They have, uh, they have massive data centers to train AI models for full self-driving. It felt like such a logical place for XAI to land, but now maybe it lands at SpaceX. I don't know.

• 21:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if, if SpaceX becomes the data centers and space company and they're effectively like reselling.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, I mean, I, I, I don't, it feels like there's some sort of, you know, arcane truth about, um, you know, consolidation where, uh, it might be not, it might be less of a headache than people think to have different entities. Like if you think about, um, I mean, certainly like, like Stargate is a separate entity from.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm not even thinking about it as a headache. It's just more so like XAI needs to

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  get quite a lot more traction, I think, in enterprise and consumer.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Somewhere, yeah.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, effectively somewhere needs to become like the dominant, uh, a dominant lab in at least one domain. Otherwise, I think it will just make sense to roll into one of these other.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, well, we should read through some of the history about founders funds investment in SpaceX because it might be one of the greatest, it might be, it might become the, the greatest venture capital investment of all time. It certainly feels like it's in the running. This from Nico Wittenborn. It says, founders fund investing 20 million out of a 20, out of a $220 million fund two, which also invested in Palantir and Spotify early is just nasty. And, uh, Dan Primack says flashback to chatting with founders fund Luke Nosick when he led the first investment in SpaceX, uh, from an old PE Week Wire newsletter, uh, in 2008. I can't believe.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  PE Week is.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  I, I read that newsletter back, not in 2008, but like back then, wow, Primack's been in the game for a long time. Um, so it says, I spent some time on the phone earlier this week with Luke Nosick of.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  From the founders fund.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Which it used to be.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  They had the the.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  They dropped it.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  And then there's also an apostrophe here, which I think has been. Lost at some point? I don't know. To discuss his firm's $20 million investment in private space launch services provider SpaceX. The company is run by Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal along the Founders Fund Partners. A few questions and answers. Dan, Founders Fund usually invests no more than a few million dollars in a company. Why invest 20 million when your fund is only 220 million? Luke, we obviously have internal caps that we follow. What we do is look at how much a company needs and invest that much. For example, we only invested $500,000 in Facebook because that's how much it needed at the time. A lot of firms were offering more. Dan says, "Most of the companies you back have some sort of internet angle,

• 24:04John Coogan?

  which makes sense, given your PayPal background. But what do you know about rocket science?" "Oh, there's no internet angle in SpaceX, right?" No one predicted the internet angle, but it is remarkable that a bunch of internet guys fund a rocket company and then it just becomes an internet company and it's an ISP and now it's a data center company and everything collapses down to the internet. And it's the Joe Weis and I'll take. AI will get every resource that it needs. Like, the internet is the business model for everything. Doesn't matter if you invest in a space company. Eventually, you're going to be in an internet business. And so Luke answering about the rocket science question. He says, "The most important aspect to us is the team."

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Remember, the PayPal founders didn't have banking experience. Dan, Elon has put over $100 million of his own money into this company. That is crazy that they'd already burned 100 mil and then Founders Fund comes in with 20. And developed both the Kestrel and Merlin engines, which are the first new rocket engines developed in the US in a very long time. When we did due diligence, we wanted to speak with other investors of successful new rockets, but they were all dead. I love that. Yeah, we just so we so we have to we we're gonna be the first here. Uh, Dan, your announcement of the funding just came days after SpaceX had yet another launch failure. Any worries, Dan? Any worries, Luke? Says Dan.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Uh, Luke says, no, there are obviously gonna be some technical kinks, like an exploding rocket. But they get amplified because rocket science is more binary than would be a technical kink with a website. Either the rocket gets into orbit, or it doesn't. The team has some very smart people and they'll make it work.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  Anybody that that ships just regular old sass should have a huge amount of sympathy for anyone in hard tech is launching any type of app and not having a single bug.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Even a single like critical bug is tough. At least like, at least, you know, early, early days and and of course, uh, critical bug in in aerospace is, uh, quite explosive.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on.

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  So, so I I did want to pull up, so just the the estimates FF is estimated to own 10.4%. Um, so we can just keep it at 10. That means that this initial, it's not, and again, they've they've invested in multiple rounds since then. Historically, like the greatest venture investment ever, in my view, was, uh, Masa's 20 million investment in Alibaba.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  Turned it into 70 billion at the time of the IPO. Hard to, I I wonder if we can figure out how much.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  FF owns about 10% of SpaceX.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  But I don't know how many, how many, they've put in billions.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. To maintain that stake, they put it in.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  So, again, it's still like gonna be a 150-ish billion dollar position. Just the carry check alone will be nasty, as Nico says.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  It's a little.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  You hit the gong for the old FF crew, my former boss?

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's hit the gong. John's former boss.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  My former boss.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  How does he do it?

• 27:13John Coogan?

  How does he do it? Yeah. Well, really quickly, let me tell you about Profound, and there's big news today from Profound. The company that helps brands show up more often and more accurately in AI platforms like ChatGPT. They've just announced their new workflows product, which lets marketers automate jobs like research, reporting, and content generation to drive even greater discoverability wherever people are searching. You can check out workflows and marketing that runs itself.

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  I was texting the CEO of Profound, James, last night, and he was giving me an update on the business. And he shared, just like a, clearly like copy and pasted it, like the new customers that they had signed. And I don't think we can share all of them yet, but it basically looked like every company in, every company, every big company, it looked like they had them, they have, they already are working with MongoDB, Indeed, Mercury, DocuSign, Ramp, Apire, Eight Sleep, US Bank, Figma, C-Gee, LG. So many of these different, you know, companies are choosing Profound, and we feel lucky to be partnered with them.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  To be partnered with them.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  Here's a good post from just another pod guy.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  We could sprinkle this in before we move on to Oracle. Just thought this was an interesting point of view. Elon is not really a person, he is the human embodiment of network effects. When you've been operating at that level and breadth that he has been, you aren't really dealing with an individual. You're dealing with a deep bench of talent and capital with a comms guy who is addicted to Twitter at his head. The same warnings about underestimating Trump, the person versus Trump's cabinet, apply to Musk but 100x, and with far less rationality injected, and with a much higher caliber of people. Does he overpromise, overhype, overhyperbolize, of course, but I would guess the median IQ and depth of expertise of the bench around Musk is higher than that of any nation state.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  I thought this was obvious to most people, so.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just, it's just crazy how. Like, yes, the, yeah, yeah, you just have to accept the overpromising, the overhyping and stuff, but recognize that it's like, no one else is trying, really. There's very, very few people.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're trying.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, but in terms of like, the real, the real people making a run at a lot of these crazy ideas, like, they're just, i- i- it's incredibly thin. It's incredibly thin. There aren't that many people. There are a lot of people that, um, yeah, just, just, just don't take it seriously. But, anyway, let's move over to one of Elon Musk's best friends, I believe.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  They're boys. They're boys.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  I think they're boys.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  Elon can count on Larry for a billion or two.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  Over text.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  So Larry Ellison is addressing, uh, he's sitting on stage here in this Wall Street Journal article on the news that Oracle shares have tumbled as AI spending outruns returns. Uh, so Oracle is facing mounting anxiety from investors about how much it's spending to build out data centers for the artificial intelligence industry. The cloud computing company's revenue and operating income for the most recent financial quarter fell slightly short of analysts' expectations, while the company raised its spending forecast, adding fuel to concerns over the timeline for turning the AI industry's ravenous demand for computing capacity into profits. Um, before we continue this article, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  So, I mean, this is all part of this, uh, I think, I think investors didn't realize that, like, when you do the one of these crazy AI deals, you have to go build the data center, and then you have to wait, and then you have to get, get power, and you have to buy the chips, and the chips have to ship.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Turn it on.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  You have to rack the chips, and then you gotta turn it on, then you gotta test it. And then you can generate some tokens and hopefully sell them. All well, enterprise AI adoption might be stacking. We'll see. There was some crazy data out of Ramp today. Uh, Ar Karazian, the economist over there.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  At least some businesses might be saying, we've got enough AI. We like it, but we have enough.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Apparently 55% of businesses are just like, good without paying for AI.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  I mean, the paying thing is

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  At least directly.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  The paying thing here is, so basically

• 31:30Jordi Hays?

  And just the example is like, a lot of businesses don't pay for cloud.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  But they effectively pay for cloud because they pay companies that leverage cloud to deliver their products.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  But it's an interesting, it's an interesting chart to see where enterprise AI adoption is going. This is from Ara Karasian over at Ramp. He says Ramp AI's, Ramp's AI index shows AI adoption held flat at forty five percent of businesses in November, driven by slight declines in finance and technology sectors by the model. OpenAI went down negative one percent, Anthropic up point eight percent, and Google went up point seven percent. And so you can see that this chart in twenty twenty five, OpenAI had a big, big jump. And then, and then just has been flat for the last, for the last couple of months, a little

• 32:22John Coogan?

  bit down. Anthropic's been on a much smoother, it seems like they didn't exist in twenty three, twenty three, basically, or maybe they didn't have a paid plan that really appealed to businesses. Then twenty twenty four, you see some slight growth here. And then twenty twenty five, a much smoother, like, okay, uptick, growing more, growing more, growing more, kind of all keeps up with this, you know, they've been ten X-ing every year, like, like an Instagram hustle account. But, but OpenAI had a massive, had a massive spike at the start of twenty twenty five, and then has been a little bit flatter. But it is interesting. I, I wonder how much you read into this. So Ara, Ara has a, has a take here we should go through. Before we do, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number

• 33:05John Coogan?

  one AI agent for customer service, automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. So he says, adoption is flat. Is the bubble popping? And he says, I'm not calling it yet. The slowdown comes at the end of a rapid run up in adoption rates in 2025, which coincided with a significant step change in the capabilities of these models. Now, the effect of the latest advancements has faded. If we want to see another run up in adoption, we would have to see at least one or two step changes, technological gains, the models get even better, spurring faster adoption, or implementation gains, early adopters figure out the best use cases for AI, and the rest of the market follows, driving incremental adoption. Both are likely, the latter even more so, as adoption actually rose in several

• 33:48John Coogan?

  industries with relatively low adoption rates like retail, construction, and manufacturing. Is Google's AI good now? He says it's still underrated. Adoption of Google's Gemini rose 0.7%, its second highest monthly increase on record. And then he says, what's going on with OpenAI? He says he cautions an overreaction to the latest results, which show OpenAI adoption dropping while Anthropic and Google adding new users, and what that means for OpenAI's business. I've learned a lot covering how companies buy and use AI. Mainly, this market changes rapidly in the typical rise and fall timelines of companies, does not apply here. OpenAI enjoyed rapid adoption of growth in 2025, in many ways emerging as default spend category for businesses, and it's not unreasonable to think that rate

• 34:31John Coogan?

  would normalize as competitors find their fit in the market. Also, there's just a lot

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  of Yeah, overall, the interesting thing is every, like, it seems to be pretty obvious at this point that the model's just getting smarter is not going to, by default, make adoption like accelerate massively again. They need to become more useful. They need to be able to, you know, Dorek Kesh has talked about this, like, they need to be able to learn on, learn on the job, basically, in the way that, that a human does. And I think, I think until we have that, there's some, you know, the forward deployed engineer movement of like having people out embedded in companies, like trying to unlock the potential of the models, that's great, but I think the models actually just need to become generally more useful.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, more useful. I don't know. Yeah, it's it's tough. I mean, when I look at those, when I look at the number, like the headline number, it's forty five percent have adopted, have paid for AI chat apps, basically. You know, he's tracking OpenAI, Anthropic, uh, Google and XAI on there, a few others. Um, and you flip that around and you're like forty five percent of businesses don't pay for AI, don't use AI. And the question is like, are they just not using AI at all? Or are they just good with free? Because if you if you told me like fifty five percent of companies are in sort of like a private equity scarcity wartime mode,

• 35:59John Coogan?

  where they're watching every dollar that goes out of the door, even a twenty dollar subscription is something that will be scrutinized. Because you know what, like the son, we've been running this business for a generation. We're not gonna spend frivolously. Every dime that goes through our business is it is precious. And so we're not just gonna go sign up for whatever. No, you don't just spend, spend, spend. Um, you need to really understand if this is valuable. And you know what? If if the particular business we have, we have a specific POS system, we have, you know, we don't have that many unstructured questions, right? Like realistically, it's like, we're not doing a lot of random email, a lot of random research for our business.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  It's more like, you know, customer comes in, take their order, put it in the POS system.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  Charge them, go do the thing, which AI is probably not, you know, replacing. So, um, it's interesting, but it is. It one of the one of the cool factors about this R. Karazian report is that it comes from ramp customers, who I don't think of as, I think of them as a little bit more forward thinking than the general population. Like, if I were to say that there's bias in the data set, I would say it's biased towards like being open to AI.

• 37:12Jordi Hays?

  For sure, for sure. Yeah, if I wonder, uh, if a company like AMEX would look at their data of like AI adoption, just for cohorts that signed up for AMEX over a decade ago.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  You would expect it to be lower.

• 37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, or or even or even putting AMEX aside, like a like a community bank. Like, because if I go to my local laundromat and I ask, like, what corporate card do you use? They're probably like, We don't do corporate cards here at all. In fact, we have a relationship with the local bank down the street and they put up the mortgage for the building and we write checks or we do cash.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  They're even using a debit card.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Or if they do have a credit card, it's probably from the local bank branch. It's not like they haven't built like their whole system. So, yeah, it's fascinating to read into. I do think there is something to be said to, I do think there is a bit of a slowdown here. Like, it's not accelerating. And it is real, that there is, it's just getting harder and harder to justify, okay, it's a no-brainer to bring it in, it's a no-brainer to pay for it. Part of that's the competitive dynamic of, you know, 50% of the value from AI, you just get it in Google search now.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  Also, what are you getting out of some of these? If you're a business that's not doing code gen, you're not generating a bunch of assets, et cetera, and somebody says, hey, for $20 a month or $100 a month, you can get somebody that's PhD level in math, but extremely low agency. You have to like tap, you have to tap the person on the shoulder.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  I like the laundromat.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  The laundromat's like, actually, I don't need somebody who's PhD level in math.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  You know what?

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  Sir, this is a laundromat.

• 38:51John Coogan?

  We've been, we've been running this laundromat in this family for 45 years, and I've never run into an IMO gold medal level problem, ever, in the math.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  I bet there are, I bet there actually are. I bet, I bet, I bet, I bet, I bet if Mark Chen wanted to create a laundromat.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Efficient allocation of laundry.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Allocation of laundry.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  You need to efficiently, I mean, if you have a big load of laundry.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Yes, how do you split it across?

• 39:14Speaker 02

  How do you distribute it?

• 39:15John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, so you have like, you have a robot on your computer that is incredibly, incredibly smart, incredibly low agency. It can't learn on the job. You have to like, tap it on the shoulder and say, hey, do this. Okay, now do that. Now do this, do that. And it's like, well. A lot of these businesses don't have, again, these problems that need that level of intelligence.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  And

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  They need people that are even have some level of agency and not even maxed out on intelligence, but can just kind of like chug away and learn on the job and get better.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Or they need SaaS products that have AI functionality built in, right?

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  And so to them, it's just, oh yeah, my POS system just flagged a couple more fraudulent orders and took care of that, or like Ramp, you know, it's like, yeah, my receipts get classified better, but I'm not like a direct user of AI. Uh, maybe they need to be on Numeral, numeralhq.com, compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance, so you can focus on growth. Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  Before that, before that, I do think it's notable. So Oracle's remaining performance obligations, which we know refers to contracted revenue not yet recognized is $523 billion. Currently, their stock is trading at $500

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  Worthy of a gong hit, sure.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  But currently, the stock is trading at only $568 billion. And so I just, I just look at this as like Oracle continues, immediately when they announced this backlog, they got a bunch of credit. It was almost immediately. And it has basically just been downhill ever since, as the market has basically said, we're giving you less and less and less and less credit here. And to the point where in many ways, they're getting like negative, negative credit for the partnership.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  That was the Financial Times take. The, the deal is worth negative 70 billion.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there, I think that the way that they framed that title was not entirely.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  Edgy.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  It was definitely edgy.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  It's a blog. It's AlphaVille. They're having fun. But, um.

• 41:25Jordi Hays?

  And then I, so I have one more, I have one more post here that's relevant. So Suspended Cap says, I got a feel like that at some point Oracle Larry was misled. Was it OpenAI showing him something in the lab? Was it Jensen lying about token prices? Or was it a partnership that was supposed to happen that didn't? It's always been clear to me that this was a race to the bottom. Why would you want to take these economics that someone as sophisticated as Microsoft was happy to pass off? Remember, I've said this a bunch on the show. Satya has more information. He owns OpenAI's IP, right? He's been serving OpenAI models. He's been, you know, running an AI. You know, it's one of the most scaled platforms, right? He has more information than anyone in the room.

• 42:09Jordi Hays?

  Momentarily, he looked, he didn't look at when Oracle announced this backlog and the stock jumped, however many hundreds of billions. Everyone was kind of like, wait, is this, did Satya miss this? And I think the market is maybe realizing some of his wisdom.

• 42:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Suspended cap says Jensen's whole thing is that the rack costs 4 million and you make 20 million. You net 16 million. No one can, no one can make you 16 million. Got it? But a lot of assumptions baked into that. Someone has to pay you 16 million for however many trillions of tokens you can spit off. If a token is a commodity and someone can serve it at 50% lower than now, it's net plus 6 million on the 4 million of costs. What if the dollars paid for the infra results in massive losses for whoever is purchasing them? Is the assumption that the capital will just keep funding it? Maybe they will. I actually think they will, but I'm just confused at what Oracle thought they saw here.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 43:01John Coogan?

  Well, story's not over. Let's move on to TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full text search. Bel come first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. So Joanna Stern has a little bit of a screenshot take joking around about Disney, which is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and is going to license their characters for use in Sora. She says, "Look at this hype. Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my bubble's complete?" I think that's from some Disney song. I actually don't know, but I, just the cadences. Do you have any idea what's?

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  That was my read.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Santa Claus is coming to town?

• 43:40John Coogan?

  No, definitely not Santa Claus is coming to town. That's not a Disney property. Is it?

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  Look at.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  But the tune you were singing sounded like that.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  This is because I'm bad at singing, I suppose. Okay, let's see if Grok can grok it. Let's see. Okay, anyway, there is news.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, is this Frozen, maybe?

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Look at this and isn't it neat? Do, do, do, do. Okay, accompanying.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  I don't know. Someone will have to tell us. Anyway. So Disney's making a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and will allow the AI platform to use its characters and properties to generate short user prompted social videos. Henry says it's from The Little Mermaid. The Little Mermaid. What is the original line from The Little Mermaid? Look at this. Okay, anyway. Disney's three-year licensing deal will let users generate videos using Sora, OpenAI's short-form AI video platform of more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar characters. A curation, a curated selection of these short videos will be available to stream on Disney Plus? Whoa, that's the bombshell there. I didn't realize that.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  Because when I think about like going to Sora, it's very fun to make a mashup video of Mickey Mouse fighting Iron Man or something like that. And that's something that doesn't make sense to underwrite within Disney. They're not going to spend the time. The CGI is too expensive. It's just not going to happen. But for a, for a kid who loves, you know, a Pixar character that wants to see, you know, Wally, join the Avengers and go fight Thanos, like, that could be a delightful, delightful experience for a young child who's, who enjoys Disney's IP. And yet it could make no sense for Disney to actually create that.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Makes a ton of sense that they would allow this to happen in Sora, in sort of a, in a way where the, the economic value is accounted for appropriately. Now, you can debate whether or not it's a slop. So historically. I just think the idea that this is going Disney Plus is crazy. That's the, that's the crazy thing. Yeah. I mean, we, we, we covered this when we were talking about Sora generally, just this idea that, um, is it a creation tool or is it a consumption tool? And we were saying, I think, pretty quickly that this doesn't feel like an app that we're gonna hang out in. Everyone in the studio was having a lot of fun. We checked their, we checked their screen times a few days later. No one was scrolling Sora. Or more meta vibes for that.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  But we continue to see outputs from Sora going pretty viral on other platforms.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  Totally. Even within our own like group chats. Like the, what's been the most impactful Sora video that you've probably seen in the last couple of weeks? Like me making a Sora video of myself promoting John Fio's energy drink company in a suit and I just sent it to him directly in a group chat and it didn't, it didn't exist and it wasn't funny in any, in any broader context. Now, the weird thing is, is that is there real demand for Sora level quality content in the Disney Plus app? Like I, when I opened the Disney Plus app, I feel like it's a place that has extremely high polish. And I feel like it's a safe place.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  Ultimately, what, what to me, that what's exciting about this is personalized entertainment. And which is why I think that Disney would be interested in doing this. If Tyler figured it out with Henry's help, the, the line earlier was, "Look at this stuff. Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my collection's complete from The Little Mermaid?" Part of your world. But if somebody loves The Little Mermaid and then you can prompt a really high fidelity personalized video for like your kid saying like, "It's time to do the dishes" and singing a little song, right? That is, that's the kind of, kind of moment that I imagine Disney

• 47:43Jordi Hays?

  would be excited about. Of course, this will be immediately abused in a thousand millions of different ways. But I'm sure they'll put a lot of guardrails in. One thing that's notable, this went out this morning. Disney accuses Google of using AI to engage in copyright infringement on massive scale. Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google demanding it to stop the infringement. So yeah, basically, the article says, as Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on massive scale, using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute infringing images and videos.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google, demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement. Quote, "Google is infringing Disney's copyright on a massive scale by copying a large corpus of Disney's copyrighted works without authorization to train and develop gen AI models and services, and by using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute copies of its protected works to consumers in violation of Disney's copyrights." So, the letter continued, "Google operates as a virtual vending machine capable of reproducing, rendering, and distributing copies of Disney's valuable library of copyrighted characters and other works on massive scale, and compounding Google's blatant infringement. Many of the infringing images generated by Google's AI services are branded with a

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  Google's Gemini logo." Falsely implying that Google's exploitation of Disney's IP is authorized and endorsed by Disney. So the question, so Disney's not just allowing OpenAI to generate these assets, but they've actually invested, and so the immediate question is, will Disney do any of these licensing, IP licensing with other platforms? It doesn't, this kind of lot, maybe?

• 49:36John Coogan?

  It feels like we're in the press release economy all over again. Yeah, I, I don't know, it does feel like Disney's sort of like picking a winner here in AI video, and they're saying like, we like OpenAI and we don't like Google, which is sort of a, sort of a bold, a bold move. You would think that they would be a little bit more platform agnostic. I, I'm fascinated by this.

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  Then again, Thrive Capital, bet.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  Bet the fund in some ways on OpenAI, who's co-owner of Thrive. Bob Iger.

• 50:10John Coogan?

  No way.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  Remember, he bought, he was a part of a small cohort that bought a few points of Thrive.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Get out the red string. It's all connected, of course.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  Get out the board. Get out the board.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  You were right, by the way, on the structure. So Disney's putting a $1 billion investment in, but they're also getting warrants to buy more stock in OpenAI at its current $500 billion valuation. So there's a little bit of opportunity in the future. If the valuation goes up, they'll get a good deal there. I really can't get over this Disney Plus news. I really, okay, it does say a curated selection. So I think that I would be very upset about the idea that I would open.

• 50:54Jordi Hays?

  It's just a random selection.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  You know where I'm going. Like, I think that Wally is a film that is, like, I think it's art. I think it's art. And I think it's okay for my children to watch Wally.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  You studied Wally.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. But I do, I do think, I do think that a lot of the Pixar films and a lot of the Disney films, they have an opinion, they have craft, they have something that elevates the human's experience, the human, like, it is not purely brain rot, it's not slop. And if you were in a funnel where you watch something that's a great, interesting film with an opinion, with something to say, and then it's like, do you want to continue watching? Five, four, three, two, one. And then it's just blasting you with the craziest aura mashups possible. Like, you're gonna make a lot of parents very upset. So this better be in another tab.

• 51:50John Coogan?

  But I do, I do like that they said it's curated, because as long as there's like some sort of human in the loop to like say like, hey, that's, they clearly jailbroke on that one, because you know people are gonna get crazy with this.

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're gonna have every Disney character doing the little yachtie walkout, you know?

• 52:08John Coogan?

  That's actually okay for the kids. I fully support that. Coffin is a banger and I'm good with that. But no, I mean YouTube kids famously went through a really, really dark period with Spider-Man and Elsa mashups and that were very suggestive and bizarre and and there's been it's been a game of whack-a-mole for a long time. And I think people don't expect when they open up Disney Plus, they don't expect it to be a game of whack-a-mole. They expect it to be curated. And so Disney really needs to needs to continue to instill this idea that they are that they are curating.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Disney has sent cease and desist letters to Meta, Character, AI, as well as against Mid Journey and some other companies.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  I wonder, have they ever sent a cease and desist to?

• 52:57John Coogan?

  To who?

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Oh, I don't know. But they should have because early, as soon as ChatGPT launched, I was having it create stories of, you know, Spider-Man. I was particularly a fan of the the deliberately IP infringing. So I'd be like, write a bedtime story for my son where, you know, Spider-Man teams up with Superman, which of course cannot happen because those are rival intellectual rival pieces of intellectual property, some owned by Warner Brothers, some owned by Disney. And so you cannot ever have those cross into the same multiverse.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  According to Google Gemini, which Disney has now sent this cease and desist to, Disney has never taken any type of legal action against OpenAI. So they picked they picked their they picked they picked a side.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  Well, fortunately, we have someone who can add a lot more context here. We have Dylan Byers from Puck News joining us in person in just a few minutes, whenever he's ready. In the meantime, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, our sponsor, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level VOD coded and deep multimodal understanding.

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this clip. Bob Iger and Sam, we're on CNBC this morning. We can pull it up.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  This is 12 minute video. Can we play some of this and see if there are key moments there? And then we will bring in Dylan.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the current deal is a three year license with exclusivity for the first year. So again, it's very possible that A year from today, Google ends up with the same ability to leverage Disney IP. Disney will set and evolve the guardrails for how its 200 characters will be used.

• 54:48John Coogan?

  One year exclusivity doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me because VO3 and Nano Banana are barely rolled out into YouTube. Like, you can put them in shorts, but it's kind of a creative tool. Like, YouTube does not seem like we got to win the AI vertical video game this year. This feels more detrimental to Facebook and Meta than OpenAI or than YouTube, honestly. Anyway, should we, let's table this video. We can come back to the clips. I'm sure it will be clipped more in more precise detail. Instead, let me tell you about Adio, the AI-native CRM. Adio builds skills and grows your company to the next level. And let's bring in Dylan Byers from Puck News. Dylan, thank you so much

• 55:31John Coogan?

  for taking the time to come down to the Ultra Dome. Good to see you in person. Welcome, welcome. Please have a seat. Thank you. And maybe you could kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, however you describe yourself these days, whatever's quickest.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  I'm the senior correspondent for Puck, where I cover the media industry, media business, media gossip.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  How is covering the media different than covering the oil and gas industry, or tech, or anything else?

• 56:06Speaker 03

  More navel gazing, more incestual.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  Because you're in the media, you can, are you doing the navel gazing, or are you reporting on navel gazing?

• 56:14Speaker 03

  I navel gaze at the navel gazers.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Okay. It's sort of an oral boros of navel gazing. Interesting.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, very incestual.

• 56:24John Coogan?

  What's, has navel gazing been the top story over the last couple of weeks, or is it more deal making?

• 56:31Speaker 03

  You're, it's, well, here's what's amazing. It's amazing that at a time when like Paramount and Netflix are going to war for Warner Brothers Discovery, the media industry is obsessed with like Ryan Liz and Olivia Nuzzi.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's a big one.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Barry Weiss.

• 56:46Jordi Hays?

  CBS.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Media industry is funny because it has a way of the smallest.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Most inconsequential gossip has a way of consuming the industry at large.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  That doesn't feel like what the last couple of months have been though. Like, the Olivia Newsy, the Glizza thing, like, that feels like much bigger than some small story. Is it really?

• 57:10Speaker 03

  It used to be bigger.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  So, part of it, part of why media loves covering media is media likes to cover things that get a lot of attention. And media businesses, in their very nature, their job is to get attention.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  So everyone knows.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  I think that's part of it. I just, I just think we're obsessed, we're obsessed with ourselves.

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  I would.

• 57:28Jordi Hays?

  But, but an example I would give, very often I'll find, like, a, a fashion brand that, that is like a household name. Will have like five million dollars of revenue, right?

• 57:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  It's because, it's because they're just like, people like fashion.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  It gets shared a ton.

• 57:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so I, I think it's a very.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  Same thing with individual influencers. Like, they might be recognized on the street. If you put them in a headline, it's going to get clicks. Versus, if I was like, I have a, I have a report here on a oil and gas company that's doing 50 million a year, you'd be like, oh, no one's gonna click on that. No one knows what that company is.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  People need stories. People need like, you need personalities.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  My, you know.

• 58:06John Coogan?

  The media lends itself to that.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, you can do that at the executive level with the Paramount Netflix WBD deal. You can do it down at, on the newsroom floor.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  I think people need personalities to make these stories.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Human. Also, there's just, you know, there's only so much intrigue in numbers.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Do you feel like the Paramount, Netflix, Warner Brothers story has been particularly personal? Have you been focused on it?

• 58:30Speaker 03

  It's the most personal, at that level, at a major M and A level, even more so than when Bob Iger and Brian Roberts went to war for Fox. Which was personal too, and had a lot of

• 58:43Speaker 03

  subplots there, especially on the Murdoch side.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Of course, this is personal. This is, you've, you've got in David Ellison, a guy who is basically staking. A lot of personal money, a lot of his dad's money, trying to get this asset and then being, doing all the right things, sending all the right signals to David Zaslove.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  Having all the right dinners.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Having all the right dinners, going to all the right fights. And then being sort of spurned at the last minute for someone else. And that negotiation and the Trump element and the relationships between Ted Sarandos and David Zaslove and then David Ellison and Larry Ellison and David Zaslove, it's like, it's absolutely fascinating.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  So, do you think, I mean, there is a world where selling a business, it should be purely economic, right? Because it's the...

• 59:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it will be.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  It will be.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  It will be in the end. The funny part is like, the, the personal element is there, but at the end of the day, whoever spends the most money is going to get the asset.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  But if you're more personal, you might be able to marshal more capital, you might know more people, you might be more, more people might be willing to rally behind you. And we're kind of seeing that with Ellison pulling in folks all over the board because, you know, he has personal relationships with them. Is that roughly right?

• 59:57Speaker 03

  That's roughly, that's roughly right. I think that, I think what you have, my, my partner, Bill Cohen, put it really elegantly. You've basically got a company with a $400 billion valuation going to war with a man with $400 billion valuation. And Larry Ellison and, and his son. And, yeah, mar- marshaling the capital for it, you know, with Gulf Sovereign Wealth Funds and Jared Kushner and all that is, is interesting. And at a certain point, Netflix is going to re- reach a threshold for what it can compete with. I mean, another point Bill made is, at a certain point, if Paramount were just willing to come in and offer like $34, $35 a share for this thing, I think it would be game over.

• 1:00:41John Coogan?

  Netflix can't do it.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  But the person, I mean, the personal element is just interesting because you've got Trump, who wants to be involved in this deal somehow. You've got David, who really doesn't like the idea, David Zaslove, who really doesn't like the idea of selling to David Ellison. But fundamentally, what you're doing is just a very extended negotiation that's going to play into...

• 1:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Why, why does he, why does he? Why doesn't he want to get involved with, with, with David?

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  I don't think this is how Zaslove wanted to go out, right? Like, I think, I'm not saying, you know, all... When David Zaslove got Warner Media, he did this whole song and dance coming to Hollywood and saying, you know, "I'm a film guy, I'm gonna save the film industry." I don't think anyone thought he was in it for the long haul. I think everyone knew this was sort of like a flip. But he liked playing the Hollywood kingpin, and I don't think he wanted to go out because David Ellison came to the table and forced him to go to market. And I also don't think that, you know, I think David Ellison and his team, and Jerry Cardinal at Redbird, I think they came in and said, you know, somewhere around that sort of $23.50, $24 a share mark.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  And I think he took offense to that, because the number he wanted and the number he thought he could get was higher to 30. And David, like, look, I have spent a lot of my time at Puck writing about all of the various misguided exploits of David Zaslove at the top of Warner Brothers Discovery. But at the end of the day, like, one thing he knows how to do very well is work a deal. The entire time that David Ellison was coming, was at the table saying, "I'll do this, I'll do this, I'll spend more", he was talking to Ted Sarandos at Netflix. And, um, basically, by virtue of playing those two off against each other, he's probably gonna end up driving this, the deal up to a price that is actually higher than $30. So, kudos to him.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Do you think he's talking to anyone else? There's been a lot of skepticism about there ever having been a second bidder. People were saying, "Oh, the whole Netflix", the idea that Netflix would even bid, that's a fake stalking.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  I remember, I remember in September, when Paramount first started this whole process, someone came to me and said, "This isn't over, Netflix is at the table." Everyone thought that was bullshit. Greg Peters went out at a Bloomberg event here in Hollywood and said, "We don't do, you know, historically, we don't do M&A deals like this, we're not interested in M&A", and everyone thought, "Okay, well, that's it." Netflix has been at the table the entire time. And in fact, if you talk to the guys at Paramount, what they'll tell you is like, they feel like... Zaslav was playing rope-a-dope with them. It's basically saying, "Yeah, come to the table, we're good. Everything you're offering is better than Netflix."

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  He's got them to just continue to bid and bid and bid and bid.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we're not done. We're not done. That's the sort of funny thing. The way when Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters go out there and talk about this, they're talking about it like it's over. It's not over.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  We're, you could have me on, you could have me back on in six months. I think we're still talking about this.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:45Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:03:46John Coogan?

  Do you think that the actual Netflix contract, the deal, the breakup fees, the announcement, the pageantry around like, "We have a deal."

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. Make it inevitable.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Is that a tactic?

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Okay, to drive a higher price from, to let Paramount know, to let Ellison know, "Hey, you're best and final? Like, now's the time to go rally the troops, go around the world, get, fire up the jet."

• 1:04:13Jordi Hays?

  How do you make, how do you make another offer and then say, "I just want to be clear, this is not my best and final."

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  Oh, that was a funny line.

• 1:04:22Jordi Hays?

  Like, I've never, I've never, I've never in a negoti-, like, never in a negotiation had somebody make a new hire offer and then also say, like, typically you'd be like, "Yeah, there's not a lot of," like, it just shows that, like, what is the incentive to take the offer at all?

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  Buy your house for a million dollars, but I could go higher.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  I could go higher. And by the way, another partner of mine, Matt Bellany, like, he's reported, Paramount will go higher.

• 1:04:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:50Speaker 03

  They will. Like, the Ellison's will go higher. And part of the thing, and this gets back to the personal element, which is what's so fascinating to me.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  David Ellison came to the Paramount deal, the first deal, with a strategy to basically wrap up as much of Hollywood as he could, scale it up, and then try to go to war with Netflix and YouTube and the guys up in Silicon Valley. The entire thesis of his battle strategy rests on him being able to acquire more than just Paramount. If at the end of the day Netflix gets Warner Brothers Discovery and he's sitting there with Paramount, he's not, he's not, he's not in the game.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so I was thinking, so he, he acquired the rights to UFC.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:05:39Jordi Hays?

  They're killing the pay-per-view model, which is interesting. The pay-per-view model was being killed by illegal streaming, which was like the bane of Dana White's existence. He basically, to my knowledge, was always angry about it. Was kind of the nature of the internet is just like if you're streaming something, it'll show up in other places, in other parts of the internet and there's not much you can do. So Paramount, you know, basically going down, throwing down and saying like, we're going to own the UFC, which is, there's a lot of people that will just subscribe because there's one-ish major UFC event every month and it's a much better deal than, than just going and buying each individual pay-per-view for $80 a pop or whatever.

• 1:06:21Jordi Hays?

  But that subscription offering becomes much more compelling if, if you're bundling in all this other IP.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:06:29Jordi Hays?

  To my question is like, you're definitely going to get the UFC fanbase, but how big is that fanbase? Certainly it's a popular sport in America, but how do you like build enough value around this to really have a competitive offering?

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  I think what's interesting about the UFC deal, what the UFC deal was a signal to the broader market, which is so much, again, having, it can be depressing to cover the media industry because a lot of the times it's going through periods of contraction or decline, or you look at, since we're talking about sports rights, you look at someone like ESPN, right, who's being forced to make all of these very calculated decisions about, you know, should we pay X amount for Major League Baseball when you're competing? Still competing for the NFL with like Amazon and YouTube.

• 1:07:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, and sports are the the last remaining content monopolies, right? So in news, you don't really have a monopoly on anything.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  News is a commodity.

• 1:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you might break the story, but everybody else will have the facts immediately.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Sports rights are the one, sports rights are the one thing.

• 1:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Leagues. So, so the UFC deal.

• 1:07:32John Coogan?

  Intellectual property, like, like, like.

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure, sure. I, yeah.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  Warner Brothers.

• 1:07:36Jordi Hays?

  But, but still, that is highly competitive with somebody else online saying, I'm gonna make an AI cartoon.

• 1:07:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  People aren't creating homegrown sports content. They're creating commentary and reaction content, but you still need to pay to see it live.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  At the end of the day, there's only one network you can watch Sunday Night Football on, and it's NBC. And that matters in a way that when news break, when a bomb goes off or a coup happens, there are a lot of different ways to go. But what was interesting about the UFC deal is at this period of sort of contraction negotiation among legacy media players, David Ellison was coming in almost like a sovereign himself and saying, I'm willing, I'm here, I'm willing to make bold bets, and I'm willing to even overpay, or what others would consider overpay, in order to go after these assets. It also helps that he's younger. He's thinking on a longer time horizon. Like, he's actually someone who's thinking, how do I build up not just a media empire,

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  he thinks about as a media and tech empire, how do I build that up over the course of decades? So he's making these really long-term bets. And again, part of that, it was never, ever just about Paramount. I remember sitting in the polo lounge with somebody before the Paramount deal even closed, and they're like, he's going after WBD next. Like, this is always, this is a, this is a scale play. And so that just brings me back to like, you can't, you can't execute the plan if you're just sitting with Paramount. And so if you're Zaslov, and the guy's like, well, yeah, our best and final offer is whatever, starts with a two, he's like, the fuck it does. Like, no, it doesn't.

• 1:09:09Jordi Hays?

  You need me more than I need you.

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:09:11Jordi Hays?

  Very clearly.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I, I, I think that, I mean, I count myself as oddly like a media, I'm, I'm just getting up to speed on a lot of these media stories, and this one's been fascinating. But just digging into David Ellison's history, I mean,

• 1:09:26John Coogan?

  Starting Skydance in 2004, he really has been in Hollywood as at least like, you know, given it his all for 20 years. He starred in Flyboy, is the movie that he shot like, it's like, he clearly wants it.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  He's about that life.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  This is not, it's not, it's hard to call him a tourist, right?

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  I don't know if you've seen Flyboy, it wasn't great.

• 1:09:46John Coogan?

  No, but, but to show up and, and not like, there are lots of like, I mean, you could easily levy the like tourist, uh, label at like Elon Musk buying Twitter, right? What does he know about social networking? He's been a, he's been a PayPal guy, then he's been a space guy, then he's been a car guy, now he's a social media guy. What does he know about the news? And it's like, that kind of was true, like he did just show up and was all of a sudden like, I use Twitter a lot, so I'm buying it.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  This is, this is a 20 year journey, right?

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  David Ellison fancies himself a true film buff.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Hollywood guy.

• 1:10:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  Grew up watching movies, going to the movies. His association with Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible to him is a massive badge of honor, because he feels like he's really been supporting the industry.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  And part of the argument you're going to see, or we're already seeing it, that, that he and his team will make against Netflix, is that Netflix is paying lip service to like the theatrical window. They're not, they're not a business that's built on putting movies in theaters. And he's like, we actually will, we, we are committed to Hollywood in the traditional sense.

• 1:10:49John Coogan?

  We're so committed that we'll, we'll put Tom Cruise yelling at you about TV settings in front of you. Have you ever seen this?

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  No, I haven't.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tom Cruise, like, there's a lot of TVs that come with like, specific refresh rates technology, like higher refresh rate, not 24 frames, it'll do like 80, uh, 48. It's like smooth motion and he hates it because it's like not as the filmmaker intended.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10John Coogan?

  And so he'll do like pre-roll ads for that, uh, clearly like a, yeah, truly like loves the theater still.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  We are going to, we are all going, in, in this process, because one thing that gets lost, you know, the creative community in Hollywood, gets really upset about the Netflix of it all.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:24Speaker 03

  Because they don't like, seem to like Netflix.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Yep. They don't like Netflix from a tech perspective, not a political perspective. They see it as politically aligned with Netflix.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  But more politically aligned with Netflix, in fact, but in terms of their nostalgia for what this industry is about.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  We're gonna see a lot of nostalgia over the course of this deal negotiation and there's gonna be a lot of hemming and hawing among the Hollywood creative community about what's happening and all I would say is whether Paramount or Netflix get WBD, like the train has left the station, like the industry has changed and even Ted's whole thing about, you know, we're committed to the theatrical window, like bullshit, like I guess movies will be in theaters for like 10 minutes before they're on Netflix, but.

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, do you think that, do you think that Holly, you know, Hollywood in the actual traditional sense, like the local community, we're recording this live from Hollywood.

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  It seems like the industry is, the culture of the industry is like dominated by nostalgia. That's like, that's the feeling that I have. The interesting thing about tech is that tech has a nostalgic element to it, tech culture, but it's like videos of us going to the moon and we're like, well, we gotta do that again, whereas Hollywood seemingly is, just wants the whole production pipeline and process to go back the way that it was. And I guess, how are, how are people processing, like having even smaller kind of potential buyer pool out of all of this?

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Well, you know what you're making me think of, I think earlier when we were talking about media, you were talking about other industries like oil and gas. Yeah, this is my example. The difference is, is that creatives are a real pain in the ass to deal with from the perspective of the front office. Sure. You build your business around them, but they have feelings about how things should be that I think people probably in the oil and gas industry or the trucking industry don't. Yeah. So there are a lot of like Tom Cruises and Martin Scorsese's who have feelings about how, how this industry should work and what you need to preserve in order to preserve the integrity of it. What happens when new leaders take over is they have to do a song and dance where they pay a lot of lip service to this. And so you see Ted Sarandos coming in and talking about

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  how great it is to acquire the studio that made Casablanca.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  The future of the film, I fucking love Casablanca, I've seen it a hundred times. The future of this business does not rest on like future generations going back and watching Humphrey Bogart. That is not where the future is going. Similarly, when David Ellison took over Paramount, there's all this lip service paid to like Walter Cronkite and the integrity of CBS News. With all due respect to David, I don't think he gives a shit about Walter Cronkite. Like, but you have to do that song and dance in order to sort of finesse the transition of the creative community. And in truth, I think what's more interesting is I think whether you're talking about a David Ellison or a Ted Sarandos, they're actually thinking about the future. They're thinking about how to go to the moon again. They're thinking about, you guys were just talking about Disney's deal with Sora.

• 1:14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to talk to you about that, too.

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  When, when, right after he, he dropped his peons to Walter Cronkite at this Paramount event just down the street a few months ago, David Ellison talked about how we were just a matter of years away from his kids being able to talk to the characters on Paw Patrol and have those characters talk back to them. Sora, the Disney Sora deal is like an early step towards that future.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  They know that's where we're going.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  It is not my kids watching Bluey over and over and over again. It is them talking to Bluey and telling Bluey what to do. They're thinking about it, but the, the dissonance between what they have to sort of say to placate the Marty Scorseses and where they're actually thinking about putting the money is, is notable.

• 1:15:15Jordi Hays?

  I feel like it's notable that, I mean, there's so, we talk to founders at least once a week that are building like video models and, and products that could eventually be used by entertainment or are being used by entertainment. And I get, as an outsider to entertainment, I get excited because I'm like, if, if budgets for films hold flat and the tools that these entrepreneurs are building get better and better, you'll eventually be able to say, you know, a movie that would have cost a hundred million dollars could now be four different movies that cost 25 million dollars and you're using AI to reduce the costs and using it for scenes that, that are just like, you know, historically expensive to actually shoot and do. And so.

• 1:15:59Jordi Hays?

  I see an opportunity for this like Cambrian, like even if budgets just hold flat, a Cambrian explosion of more creativity, more people having the opportunity to create films and television shows and things like that. But it feels like there's like zero excitement here about that. And maybe it's, and maybe it's because it's in pockets, because if you're-

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  It's entirely outside of the Hollywood system. Like, the iPhone really did democratize filmmaking, but like, the end result of that was like Mr. Beast on YouTube.

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  But I'm just saying, I'm just saying it's still, I'm saying, I'm saying even though the technology's not being created here, it still could be a catalyst for the industry.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  I think it's a competitor.

• 1:16:43Jordi Hays?

  But, but, it is, it is, and, and it's, and it's, and it's a tool.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  It's a tool. I mean, it, it's a tool. And as with the iPhone, the question is, who, who gets, who has the, who has the access to the tool and, and who gets to harness the tool and then do something great with it? Yeah, the iPhone sort of democratized your ability to create content, and you can argue that the vast majority of what's out there is slop and is not nearly as good as what Hollywood can create. But then again, you just have to look at where people are spending their time. People are spending more time with user-generated content. People are spending more time on YouTube than they are on any other streaming platform.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  You can be able to talk to Humphrey Bogart.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  You can talk to-

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  That's what I'm saying. Put me in Citizen Kane.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can put him on the plane.

• 1:17:28Jordi Hays?

  Wile, Wile Coyote teaches algebra.

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'll happen, for sure.

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  The, the problem with nostalgia and with trying to preserve the order as it is, is that the tools are there, they're going to be harnessed, they are more democratized than they have been in the past.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  And at a certain point, the eyeballs are gonna go where they're gonna go, and you can't force it.

• 1:17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  And there's this weird sort of like Amish, like, let's just like preserve this moment in time that-

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay, so, so, so, is, if we, if we hopped in a car and drove over to Burbank and snuck into Disney-

• 1:18:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Do you think Bob Iger has like a total revolt on his hands today? Because I feel like Disney is one of the- Truly creative places, they hire tons of those artists that have opinions. They're talent driven, uh, and yet they just put out an announcement. Yeah, we're gonna do AI content. It feels like a very, it feels like a divisive issue if I was, you know.

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure it is for some people. I increasingly find that the stakes are so high and that the change is so fast that the need to meet it is existential. And I think leaders like Iger increasingly care less about that blowback. You know, I'm so funny. I, a long time, like 20 years ago, I was an intern at The New Yorker. And I remember when they opened up, you could, they did it the back page where people could submit captions for The New Yorker cartoons. And the cartoonists hated it because they felt like that was their, the integrity of their work should not be opened up to the public. And in fact, that became like one of the greatest sources of engagement with The New Yorker was through that.

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  I think people recognize that the, being able to say, I want Darth Vader on a beach or I want, you know, Captain Underpants doing XYZ, like that is going to happen.

• 1:19:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:30Speaker 03

  You can already sort of do it. And the question for Disney is, are we going to have a piece of that revenue? Are we going to make money off of it? And in fact, if we know that that's where the puck is going, and at a certain point, you will be able to talk to your favorite animated characters. How can we, if we engage with that, then maybe we can start driving. Maybe that helps keep engagement. Maybe that helps drive people to theme parks. There's a whole nother piece of it I was talking about with my colleague, Julie Alexander, just earlier today, but there's a, there's a whole nother element here too with YouTube where, you know, YouTube is, or sorry, Google is starting to generate Disney characters and Disney doesn't want that happening.

• 1:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you saw they, they, they launched a cease and desist last night.

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:20:17Jordi Hays?

  There's, they're, they're, they're taking legal action against basically seemingly every scaled player except OpenAI. The OpenAI deal is a one-year exclusive. And so I think that opens up, uh, I'm assuming Disney's using these lawsuits and, and the cease and desist to start a negotiation of, of what, of what this will look like once everybody gets access to it. But it's, it's notable that I think this is. Even today, just seeing the timeline, I think this is underrated as a deal for OpenAI to be able to drive just at a time when it feels like their their product is being

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  I completely disagree, but continue.

• 1:20:56Jordi Hays?

  At least at least somewhat threatened by by Gemini.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  If you're if you're if you're an American household.

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Jordi Hays?

  And and you're like a Disney family, what what family of apps are you going to be paying money to? Right? If one of them creates these magical experiences for your kids? And the other, you know, is completely blocked from generating any IP around that because like when kid, I don't I don't know. My my kids are young, but if you're a 10 year old. And you realize that like you can like my son, I generate like pick I take pictures of us and I turn us into dinosaurs and I have used chat GPT to do that a lot. It's stuck in his head. He'll be like, let's make some like, let's make dinosaur pictures. And so when kids realize that any Disney content that they can watch can immediately be like brought into their life.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:49Jordi Hays?

  That's going to be

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  Or if he comes to you and says, hey, let's let's turn ourselves into the Avengers. And you're like, well, there's only one app that allows me to do that. Then boom, you're in you're back in Sora as opposed

• 1:22:00Jordi Hays?

  And you're going to pay for it because I think parents will pay almost any price to bring joy to their children.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I mean, I agree with that. I just think it's it's going to be a slow take off of that type of content because

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think I don't think the the whole thing like Studio Ghibli, was that a slow take off?

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  Absolutely. It was it was it was a huge. It was a huge meme moment where everyone had to have one. Everyone needed to see what they looked like in the Studio Ghibli mode. And then the usage like dropped off and then started climbing at like 1%, you know? And it is climbing and it is going to grow and it is and it will be

• 1:22:32Jordi Hays?

  Sure. I'm just saying you now have 200 different characters, the most valuable IP in the world.

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  I'm not saying it's bad. It's definitely like an improvement to that product and it will make Sora a better app and it will

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  Not just Sora, but it's it's it's I'm assuming I didn't see specifically, but I'm assuming, yeah, it's chat GPT and Sora. So it's going to be take

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  To bring it. Yeah, yeah. But to bring it back to the the Ellison. Uh, like the Paramount, WBD, like if you put them together, you get something like 15% of all watch hours in America controlled by that company. If you put, take Netflix and, and WBD, you put them together, you get 14%. You saw that quote, right?

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  Uh, like Sora, I think is going to be at like less than 1% for like years and then it will eventually be 5% and then 10%, but it just, uh, uh, next year is not going to be like the year that 10% of watch hours were AI-generated video. Like it's just not there yet.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  I think I just, I, I commend Iger on at least trying to,

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  trying, trying to adapt the, his company for this future.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  Cause that is where it's going. I mean,

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:39Speaker 03

  it's very hard to reject the thesis, even with the available technology, which feels like very beta, very 1.0.

• 1:23:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  That that's not where this is headed. And if you've got, no one is sitting on a better IP portfolio than Disney, particularly when you're talking about kids, obviously.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  So, and then there's no easier way to do this than with animation.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  So why not go there?

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  I just think, so, so I looked it up.

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:05Jordi Hays?

  Disney Plus has just under 60 million total paid subscribers in the US and Canada. I think a lot of those subscribers are, are subscribing for content for their children.

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  Don't underestimate how many people without kids go to Disneyland.

• 1:24:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true. There's a big, it's a big number. I'm, I'm just saying like that cohort, OpenAI has like what? A third of that in paying subs globally? And so I just think this is, I, I do think this is at least for the next 12 months. I think this is going to be a, this is, ChatGPT doesn't have a lot of moats, right? Like the, the product is better than other comparable products.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:24:48Jordi Hays?

  And this is a new moat where if you're those 60 million people that are paying for Disney Plus.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  Like you're an ultimate fan.

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  And you're, you're a super fan and you're going to parks.

• 1:24:56John Coogan?

  Not gonna do it for you.

• 1:24:57Jordi Hays?

  How many people visit, uh?

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  Here's an anecdotal thing.

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:25:03Speaker 03

  Most, to the best of my knowledge, the one, the one way I've been able to make my son cool in his second grade class is by getting him on Sora, like introduce, letting him play around with Sora earlier than his friends.

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  Didn't do that with Minecraft.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  But like, did that with Sora.

• 1:25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  And I have all those friends coming up to me and being like, what is Sora? Tell us about Sora. Can we use Sora?

• 1:25:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:21Speaker 03

  I'm sure the other parents hate me.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a wild thing to do.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  But you do see, this is purely anecdotal.

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  You see that level of like, oh my God, can we create some, can we just say something and create it?

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  And you think about how sticky Disney has been, right? Like, I, I, I don't know a single parent in my kid's class who doesn't have a Disney Plus subscription.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  You are just, you are, you are, if you, if that, if you can do that on Sora and you can't do it on its competitors.

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying, John.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  That's really, that's potentially really valuable.

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  In 2023, the last reporting period for the parks that I can find, 140 million people globally paid to go to a Disney park and experience.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  The Disney.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  I'm sold extremely bullish for OpenAI, extremely bullish for HBD. No, no, no, no, no. You, you win me over on this.

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  I just think.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  I, I, I still don't think, I still don't think a significant percentage of content consumed by Americans next year will be fully AI-generated. I think that's where we're gonna see a slow, that's where we're gonna see a slow takeout.

• 1:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, slow takeout there.

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  But yes, it's a great deal. Hats off to Fiji CMO.

• 1:26:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so if, if you get 100, 140 million people visit Disney parks this year, I bet you they will have things in the park, which is like recreate this moment, turn this into an animation.

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  This is very good. This is very good.

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  It is very, I, I just think what the timeline this morning that was interesting, everybody looks at the headline number, $1 billion.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  And they're like, this is a round, this barely, this is like slapping duct tape on, on the, on a boat that's leaking water, right? It doesn't feel like that big of a number, because it's not in the context of OpenAI, but the, but the competitive edge that gives them over the next 12 months is massive.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. This is a great conversation.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  It's such an honor to finally be in the dome.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  I'm so glad you're here.

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure with the way the WBD deal evolves, you'll be a regular guest.

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  I'm just at the streets, so anytime.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Fantastic. This is great. Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Uh, we have our next guest, Fiji CMO.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, hit the, hit the gong for us. It would be, it would be our honor.

• 1:27:23Speaker 03

  I don't know if I've earned this.

• 1:27:25John Coogan?

  Well, well, what's a big number? You gotta give us a number. How many years you been writing?

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  Fourteen. Fourteen years overnight success.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Linear. Meet the system for modern software development streamline work. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. Let me also tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds. Our next guest is Fidji Simo from OpenAI. She is the CEO of Applications. We are very honored to be joined by Fiji. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great to have you on the show.

• 1:28:13Speaker 04

  Great to be here. Thank you so much.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining. I would love to kick it off with a little bit of a little bit of backstory and just what was the conversation like to recruit you to have you join OpenAI? It's a big move. It rocked the timeline and I'd love to know what was the pitch? What was the opportunity? How did you wind up at OpenAI?

• 1:28:36Speaker 04

  Well, I had the extreme privilege of being on the board of OpenAI for many months. Like I think about a year before Sam approached me and therefore we were already working really closely together. And then at some point he told me, hey, it looks like, you know, there's a lot to do and it looks like you have ideas on how to do it. So is there any sense that we could make this happen? And I had, you know, a big job running Instagram at the time, so it took some time to transition, but I was incredibly inspired by the mission of OpenAI already and it felt like a no brainer.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  And can you take us through the GPT 5.2 announcement? I mean, one of the first documents that I think everyone knows you for in the OpenAI context, in the context of your new role is the the different areas where you see GPT 5 and OpenAI having impact, ChatGPT having impact in folks' life. Can you explain to me how you think those those different sections are going? What excites you about the news today? And kind of contextualize, how do you think about the map of what ChatGPT as an application is touching?

• 1:29:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a big question, so.

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  We can break it down one at a time.

• 1:29:51Speaker 04

  No, I've got it. Um, you know, when I, when I look at the opportunity ahead of us, I think AI is the greatest source of empowerment for people. And I want ChatGPT to be the personal super assistant that allows you to advance every part of your life. So the manifesto that you are referring to, to me, was like putting on papers this notion that if you look at how the world works right now, wealthy people have a lot of support staff. They have a travel agent, they have a personal shopper, they have a financial advisor. Imagine if we could give that team of support to everyone on earth. And fundamentally, that's what I want to build.

• 1:30:33Speaker 04

  And I think with ChatGPT, we have the opportunity to graduate from what is still fundamentally a chatbot that you ask questions to, to a personal super assistant that gets everything done in your life. Um, when you put that in the context of, uh, the announcement today, we're super excited to have launched 5.2. It's the leading model on, on, uh.

• 1:30:58Speaker 04

  I, I was really hoping for that.

• 1:31:01Speaker 04

  It's a leading model in terms of everyday professional work. It, it, it's a big step change in intelligence. You see that on the benchmarks, obviously, but that gives me a lot of hope that we can be closer to achieving a lot of, uh, leaps on, on these use cases. So for example, if you take something like travel, you, you have to like, you know, be good at long horizon tasks. You have to understand the goal of the users very well. And so with GPT 5.2, um, and like the new capabilities, we're getting one step closer to making all of that possible.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, uh, I feel like some people have a little bit of benchmark fatigue. They, you know, everyone has their own prompts and they feel like stuff's getting better, but it's hard to, like, like, everyone wants the original ChatGPT moment again. So what have you done in for me lately syndrome? Um, but I'm interested, putting all of that aside, I want to know, how are you measuring success internally around the launch of a new model? Like, what does the, what does the, the, the rigor around developing KPIs, obviously? The company is in the interest of driving subscriptions and revenue, but there must be interim steps and A B tests. And I mean, this is your lineage.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  This is what this is what makes you who you are. How do you think about assessing the impact of new models when they go out like downstream of the benchmarks in the actual application?

• 1:32:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that's like my entire job is turning the breakthroughs into products that people use. And so, for example, on 5.2, we just talked about the consumer side. I can go back to that. But on enterprise, for example, it's really important to us. We serve a million businesses across the world. What we look at is like, can companies start to do things that they weren't able to do before? We just released earlier this week an AI report for enterprise. And it said that 75% of people were saying of workers were saying that with AI, they can accomplish tasks that they couldn't do before. And then we see that even on the coding stat on coding.

• 1:33:14Speaker 04

  If you look, coding queer messages from non engineers has grown 36%. And so I look at all of these things as like, these are all like the research team gives me this like magical superpowers. My job is to put the superpowers in the hands of people and at home and at work. And the thing we measure is can they do more? And are they actually like understanding the use case and doing more? And there's a lot, you know, there is a big narrative around like, is AI adoption really happening? Is it going fast enough? But what I am seeing is that there is a lot of pent up demand as long as you cross those capabilities. So I'll give you an example.

• 1:33:56Speaker 04

  All companies that I meet with tell me that if there was a way to generate spreadsheets much like faster with AI, generate slides much faster with AI, they would use it for a lot more knowledge work. Because, you know, all all knowledge workers generate spreadsheets and slides. With five point two, like that's a big step up in the ability to do that. Like I can tell you with five point one, I was trying to do it and the spreadsheet was kind of janky. Things were like not, not really in the right place. With five two, it's like great formatting. It totally understand what like, you know, the numbers are about. It structures them the best way. And these are the things that like help unlock completely new use cases and ultimately growth for the customers that we work with.

• 1:34:39John Coogan?

  Do you, do you feel like there's a, there's some sort of fundamental cultural difference between,

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  you know, your previous roles where there hasn't been so much of this divide between the consumer side of the business and the enterprise side of the business on day one. I feel like ChatGPT is unique in that it's used by kids and college students and adults. And people use it, just they bring it to work with them alongside and then enterprises and the governments using it. Uh, whereas for something like a social media application, it didn't really have that same, oh, we need the, we, we need this product to work for us in an enterprise context necessarily. Um, how, how is that, how has that shift been designing an application that can be used? It's sort of the same underlying model, but it's used in such different ways.

• 1:35:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a great question and that's, that's the thing that we spent a lot of time working on. The, the thing that's really interesting is that part of the reason why we're winning in enterprise is because we're winning in consumer. When you talk to CEOs, they tell you, well, if my workers are already completely familiar with the technology because they use it for their personal use, that's much easier to deploy that in enterprise and have that be adopted. So that familiarity is actually really helping us. And so the thing we're trying to do is really keep that familiarity, but upsells the tools that are really specific to enterprise. So I'll give you an example. Uh, connectors is a, is a great example. We do have connectors on the consumer side. You can connect your chat GPT to your Gmail and, and things like that.

• 1:36:16Speaker 04

  But on the enterprise side, it's even more critical. You have to be connected to like Slack, to like all of your enterprise knowledge. And so these are cases where we push harder on the enterprise side to make sure that. Companies are doing what they need to unlock the value.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd love to hear your take or how you're thinking about the partnership with Disney. Jordi and I were just going back and forth on it. Landed in an extremely excited place.

• 1:36:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my.

• 1:36:46John Coogan?

  Seems like a fantastic partnership.

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  I think that, I think that in general, looking at the timeline this morning, obviously, everybody's going to form an opinion on the partnership immediately, even before they kind of understand the facts. But as I looked at it, I think it maybe was getting less hype than maybe it deserves because it's only a $1 billion investment. It's relatively small in the context of OpenAI.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  It's an investment for ants.

• 1:37:10Jordi Hays?

  But if you look at Disney's scale, the example I gave last, there's like 140 million people have paid to visit a Disney park in the last year. I would imagine that all, like, I can imagine a world where over the next year, every person that's visiting a Disney park is like, hey, I can kind of like personalize this experience and like take, and basically create this entirely new kind of like entertainment layer to that.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  So I need a relationship with OpenAI, one way or another.

• 1:37:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'm going to pay for the product. So it feels extremely significant in a way that maybe people aren't fully appreciating.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, we're very, very excited about it. If you think about like Sora and Image Gen, this is all about unleashing creativity. I think we're all born creators and like if you give people the tools to create easily and to go fast from imagination to a creation, we can see, you know, the golden edge of creativity. But for that, like, you know, we need people to have inspiration, to have like, you know, like IP to play with. And Disney has by far the best IP, by far the best inspiration. And so partnering with them to bring these experiences to life is such a privilege and we're really excited about it.

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, how our audience, I was thinking about this last night, our audience is probably on average spent way more money on ads than actually seen ads because many folks in the audience have spent money on on digital ad platforms, run ad businesses. How do you think about positioning the ads product or whatever happens to the other side of the of the market, like the brands that want to be successful in the future of commerce? Do you have any, do you have any idea of the the shape that it will take? Because, you know, we were just doing a Black Friday stream and just one founder after another singing the praises of the the meta ecosystem, even the AppLovin ecosystem, the

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  ability to go and and put money in a magical box and get customers is remarkable. Have you thought more about what you want to offer ultimately to brands and companies that will be ultimately be partnering with OpenAI?

• 1:39:24Speaker 04

  So, not much to announce today on ads, but what I can tell you is two things. One, like, if we at some point we we decide to go towards ads, we're gonna do it in a way that is extremely respectful of the very special relationship that people have with ChatGPT. Like, the thing to understand is, people trust that ChatGPT has their back and gives them the best answer for their needs. Nothing we do can like jeopardize that. And so, you know, when I talk to brands and they're like, hey, how can we get more distribution? How can we, you know, influence the results of the LLM? So, reality is, have the best products.

• 1:40:07Speaker 04

  You know, we want to build an LLM that is not impacted by, you know, paying companies that is not impacted. By, you know, people giving the system and purely recommends the brands that are going to be best for you. Now, around that, around that model response, you can imagine that there are things that we could do to get, to give brand solution, but we really want to keep the model response pure because the trust that people have in that is critical.

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, is there, is there a good, like, I don't know, like, how, how do you actually set up a company for that? You need like an editorial like firewall so that one team is just not even affected. They don't even like, you know, hang out at the happy hours together and say, hey, you know, can, can you go do this this quarter because we have a big partner? Like, have you thought about what, what, what it culturally takes to get there?

• 1:40:56Speaker 04

  Well, the first, the very good news at OpenAI is that the culture is already so focused on protecting the user, protecting the purity of LLM responses. It's so ingrained that I think anyone who would, you know, shout like, hey, can you help me change things? That's a, that's a holiday party would be organ rejected. So I think that's, that's already, you know, good. We built the right antibodies, uh, day one. The other thing is, I think we're not just going to rely on culture, we're also going to rely on technical capabilities that have firewalls between these different things so that people can really trust that the model is not influenced by anything other than having their back.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. How are you thinking about, uh, the, like, setting up the actual applications team for success? Are you, um, I, I, I've been struck by the fact that the narrative has shifted in some ways from, uh, you know, the best model wins every time, the best model, the best model, the best model, the best benchmarks, like, just win and, you know, and then everyone will just switch around. It feels like we're almost leaving that era where, you know, the, the technical insiders, they do care about the benchmarks, they do care about the capabilities, but a lot of consumers just care about the user experience, the design, the, the, the, the, like, the almost the qualitative aspects.

• 1:42:19John Coogan?

  How have you thought about, uh, developing a, like, a delightful user experience? Is that a new muscle for the organization? Do you feel like OpenAI is set up to deliver, you know, this, this delightful experience that can reduce churn and, and keep people coming back? How, how do you think about that?

• 1:42:37Speaker 04

  Well, first off, I would say, you know, this is a company that despite not starting as a product company, has built the fastest growing consumer and enterprise business industry, a product with eight hundred million people. So while I think I can, you know, build an organization that does that even better, I really want to celebrate what what they've done before me. And and I think you're you're absolutely right. I think the magic is at the intersection of research and employment. So the thing I obsess about is how can we be tied at the hip with a product research team to understand what are the new capabilities that can unlock this new magical product?

• 1:43:19Speaker 04

  And you you kind of see that, like, Sora, which we were just talking about a minute ago. It's a good example where the capability was there and and like that's what unlocks everything. But then the product thinking came in of like, you know, putting characters and yourself inside the video. And so it's really a mix of like capabilities, but also a lot of delightful product thinking and really understanding what people want that unlocks these magical experiences. We were even talking at the beginning about kind of all of the use cases, right? Like me, like, you know, just giving people more intelligence in the chatbot, like, that's gonna cap out at some point. What I need to do is help them realize they can use ChatGPT for health

• 1:43:59Speaker 04

  and like help them, you know, make that easier, help them plan their travel, help them shop. Like, all of these things are gonna be based on incredible models, but also great products that makes this understandable. Because right now, you're still kind of having to stumble upon the value. And like, when people realize they can use ChatGPT for health, they're like, oh, my God, this is like unbelievable. But they kind of had to stumble upon it. And that means I haven't done my job fully until everyone knows how to use the value.

• 1:44:29Jordi Hays?

  You guys are, Sam was talking earlier this week with some folks about the push into enterprise. How are you thinking about enterprise, not on the API side, but just on the core subscription size and around pricing? Historically, as a 200 a month plan subscriber for ChatGPT, I had hit some points where I'd be frustrated because I could sense the model being lazy. And I'm like, I'm giving you as much money as you've, I'm on the highest plan. Can I be on a plan that's just not, never gets lazy?

• 1:45:05John Coogan?

  This is the rumored $2,000 a month plan?

• 1:45:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I'm thinking like, I just like, can you make, would it make sense to ever do an all you can eat?

• 1:45:15John Coogan?

  Consumption.

• 1:45:15Jordi Hays?

  All you can eat.

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  Or consumption based?

• 1:45:17Jordi Hays?

  Consumption on the non-API side?

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:20Jordi Hays?

  Just because, you know, I think.

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  Consumer consumption based is wild. No one wants to do that, but I don't know. It's a bold, bold statement. I'd be interested to hear what you think.

• 1:45:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, we've launched credit-based pricing on the enterprise side so that in addition to your subscription, you can buy extra credit to get more. I think that's a model that could possibly work on the consumer side. So, you know, we are open to exploring anything. We have it like now for Codex. And so, you know, that's something that we could totally explore, but I think it goes back to a lot of the very, I would say, like sophisticated people really understand like the concept of buying more intelligence. Regular people just want like more outcomes. So I think the more we make that transition from a chatbot to like you give us your list of tasks and we do your tasks.

• 1:46:11Speaker 04

  The more we're going to be able to make people realize the value and then, you know, the pricing will follow.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Your original manifesto, you outlined knowledge, health, creative expression, economic freedom, time, support. That sort of covers everything. Is there a seventh capability that you're excited about? You mentioned spreadsheets. Maybe that's the seventh one, right after time and creative expression?

• 1:46:35Jordi Hays?

  Put it at the top.

• 1:46:36John Coogan?

  That should be at the top. Economic freedom, spreadsheets. But is there, is there a seventh category or a nascent, just even in your own personal use, a new capability that you feel like, okay?

• 1:46:50John Coogan?

  You know, maybe this year has been the year of agents. We've gotten coding agents. We've gotten deep research a year or two ago. Uh, you know, is there some new capability that you've seen glimmers of, okay, I think we're actually solving this piece, or I think it might be good enough to use in this scenario?

• 1:47:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, we touched on a bunch, but what I would say is like, for me, the next step is unlocking connection to the ecosystem. So like, ChatGPT is self-earned insular. And we launched, you know, at Dev Day, we launched on our platform. But I think, like, we were talking about health, like, health would be so much more powerful if you could connect ChatGPT to your health record and all of your kind of bio wearables. Um, yeah, we were talking about like travel. It's so much more powerful if ChatGPT can connect with, you know, a lot of like, uh, travel companies. And so figuring out how it can not just do things in this like, you know, text format, but really connecting and doing things in the real world. That's the thing that

• 1:47:53Speaker 04

  I think the models are ready for, but we're still catching up on the product side to make that possible and unlock these really like, you know, much more sophisticated use cases.

• 1:48:03John Coogan?

  There's a ton of questions in the chat about the, about the code red. We have to ask, how is it going? Has it been an intense period for culturally? It feels like there's been, you know, a lot of ups and downs in any startup's history. Uh, I imagine that it's been exciting and, and, and thrilling to, to reengage. But how has it been in internally so far?

• 1:48:26Speaker 04

  Well, for context, you know, code reds are not uncommon. Like, uh, we declare code reds as a way to really marshal a lot of resources towards a priority. It's a way to signal what's at the top of the list and what can be deprioritized and focus. And I think during this time, focus is critical. And in terms of how it's going, I mean, I'll let you be the judge of it, but I'm pretty proud of what we're releasing today and like, you know, like leading, uh, leading the way in terms of, you know, best model for everyday professional work that has been a goal of ours for a long time. It's been in the works for a long time. It didn't start with the code red, but we're really excited to be able to release that today. And on top of that, it's our 10 year anniversary today. So it's

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Wait, today?

• 1:49:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:10John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:49:16John Coogan?

  Get a trading card up ASAP, team. What are we doing? 10 year anniversary of OpenAI, that's incredible.

• 1:49:21Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 1:49:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic. That's amazing. Congratulations.

• 1:49:25Jordi Hays?

  How startups historically have been able to innovate because they tolerate some some amount of failure. And I think if you look at the hyperscalers too, they're willing to like launch products that that just don't work, right? If you look at the history of Google, they're they take moonshots, they make bets, not everything works, some do, and it's and it's an effective way to, you know, continue to innovate. How have, I feel like when OpenAI releases a new product now, whether it's Sora or the browser or anything like that, it faces so much scrutiny from the world. Some people are excited and bullish, other people want to see it fail. How how are you guys kind of, what's your internal framework around failure

• 1:50:10Jordi Hays?

  today? Because ideally, you want to keep shipping a lot of things. And if you ship three things that don't work and one thing that does, it's like, great, you have a new a new product that you can scale.

• 1:50:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, you know, I'm I'm no stranger to a lot of scrutiny throughout my career. I've worked at companies that that went through a lot of phases like that. And I would tell you, I think it's like, it's simple and cliche, but you kind of have to block out the noise. The thing that's good about OpenAI is like, so North Star is very is very clear, right? It's AGI that benefits all of humanity. And we have a lot of conviction internally that we're on the right path to do that. And that does mean that, you know, some things are going to work, some things aren't. And because the culture is rooted in a research lab, which is very different from other companies I've worked at, I think the fear of failure is

• 1:51:00Speaker 04

  much less because people already know in research that you explore a lot of paths and like many don't work, like that's the core of research. And so because that's the DNA, people don't freak out when a product doesn't work because they're like, oh, it's kind of like research, we have to test a lot of things and some of them will hit, some of them won't. But but I think this innovative spirit has gotten us to where we're at and really leading the market. And I think that's something that we absolutely need to preserve.

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 1:51:28Jordi Hays?

  Last question, do you think, are we still going to see age verification this year? Is that or is that going to be a 2026 launch?

• 1:51:37Speaker 04

  So edge verification is starting to roll out already in some countries and we're doing a slow rollout so that we can make sure that we're very accurate in predicting the kid was an adult and then the adult mode that's going to be unlocked by edge verification is going to land in Q1.

• 1:51:53Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the amazing progress and such.

• 1:52:00Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations to the whole team.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  Congratulations on 10 years in the business of building AGI. We're feeling the AGI here. Have a great rest of your day and we hope to talk to you soon.

• 1:52:10Jordi Hays?

  Good chatting.

• 1:52:11Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:52:14John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on CryptoRail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. I love that when I do the WWE voice for the Stripe, for the Stripe portfolio company or wholly owned. Anyway, let's go back to the timeline. Let's take you through some news. That was a fun back-to-back. I enjoyed both of those folks. That was, I feel like, it's very funny that we were discussing all week the David Ellison, Netflix, Warner Brothers, we're getting up to speed on media and what's going on there

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  and then boom, we get our little treat, the crossover of the decade with Disney and OpenAI. It's funny, you were clearly alluding to me being confused by the Disney, OpenAI deal because I went on my own roller coaster thinking, okay, is this like a nothing burger? Is this a good thing? And now I am fully in your camp. I think it's very good. And I think that it does feel like we might go into something like the press release economy that's going on in the prediction markets wars where every foundation model might need to Hoover up particular partnerships because I didn't even know exclusivity was

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  on the table. Like, you know that OpenAI has a content licensing partnership with the Wall Street Journal? And so the Wall Street Journal gets paid when they, if I hit ChatGPT and I ask for a detail about SpaceX's latest launch, it's probably going to ask the Wall Street Journal, it's going to ask a lot of different sources, but they pay the Wall Street Journal. Now, if they do an exclusive with the Wall Street Journal and I'm like, I can't get that in Claude. Claude just doesn't know.

• 1:54:02Jordi Hays?

  That's way less significant because the Journal works on the same news.

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  No, no. To me, the journal is like Disneyland on a thousand. I would, I would gladly never go to Disneyland ever again. If I could just read this precious, this precious paper newspaper every day. No.

• 1:54:20Jordi Hays?

  You're like, any Disney content ever again in your life, or the journal?

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  This is, this is, this is the Disneyland of business.

• 1:54:27Jordi Hays?

  Of your mind, of your mind.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  Of my mind. Uh, no, no, of cour- of course you are correct. Uh, there are not many, uh, Wall Street Journal fans that are anywhere near as insane as the Disney, Disney files. Uh, what is Lee Sin Algaib here saying? Lee Sin says, GPT five point two pro, it has ridiculous pricing, once again, twenty dollars and one sixty eight dollars. Uh, Tyler, do you know if, if GPT five point two pro is more expensive? I guess they're raising prices.

• 1:54:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so this is the pro model. These are always like the very expensive ones.

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:59Speaker 02

  Um, I, I think it's pretty, let me actually look at the, the normal model, but I think it's pretty comparable.

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  I guess five point one was one, uh, one dollar and seventy five cents and fourteen dollars. So it's a pretty significant, uh, pretty significant in- uh, in- increase, but, um. I don't know. They, uh, like this is a new technology. We don't know where the Pareto frontier of pricing is necessarily. We don't know.

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's slightly more expensive. It's, uh, yeah, five point one was a dollar twenty five cents on the input. Uh, it's a dollar seventy five cents for five point two. It's like, you know, marginally more expensive.

• 1:55:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, um, so, let's see. Uh, direct challenge to anthropic. The knowledge cutoff is, uh, August thirty first, twenty twenty five. So, uh, Yuchin Jin here from Hyperbolic Labs, the co-founder and CTO, is saying that this is a freshly pre-trained model.

• 1:55:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so, um.

• 1:55:53John Coogan?

  Do you believe that? Have you, have you been studying the timeline while we've been live, understanding what's going on?

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, so, so some people are, are saying it's new pre-train. Um, that's the newest like cutoff, uh, date, uh, since, uh, what was it?

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Is there a way that they could not do a full pre-train, but they could just kind of do an update with the new?

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So, um, people are, it's like, oh, it's a new cutoff.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:12Speaker 02

  Uh, usually you'd think that's a new pre-train. Um, it's probably more like a, it's like a mid-train or something like this, where you basically do continued pre-training on, on new data. So it's, it's probably not an actual pre-train, because you'd expect that to be like a much bigger update, right? You'd, it's like, oh, GPT six, not GPT five point two.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I still, I still have to, I, I still feel like the four O pre-train, that's like the, like the, the latest and greatest up until now. Uh. Running that back, I mean, that thing was expensive, but it's not that expensive compared to now because they have so much more money.

• 1:56:40Speaker 02

  I don't think five, wait, four oh?

• 1:56:42John Coogan?

  Four oh?

• 1:56:42Speaker 02

  Four oh was never expensive. It was always cheaper.

• 1:56:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, but wasn't four oh like the base pre-trained for like pretty much everything today to, to, to date?

• 1:56:48Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  And so rerunning that, I mean, it was expensive at the time. It was like probably a hundred million dollars. But now a hundred million dollars, like they got.

• 1:56:55Speaker 02

  That's like one AI researcher.

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So they should be ripping pre-trains all the time just because, just to keep the timeline in check and keep them guessing.

• 1:57:03Speaker 02

  They still got it.

• 1:57:04John Coogan?

  Uh, Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Um, what you got here? We're eating good. Future pipelines may need to unify pre, mid, post-training, injecting reasoning data earlier and more continuously. To anyone wondering if 5.2 is a new pre-trained, I'm letting you connect the top, the dots between this, says Alexander Doria. And this synth slash agent pipelines aside, this is the new main catch of Deep Sea 3.2. This isn't a new model card, new elo update. It's an architectural update at mid-training scale, everything mutable. And, uh, we are, everything's mutable and we are likely to see more and more sub-model speculation.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, we'll have to let the 5.2 news sort of simmer in the timeline. Let everyone do their own benchmarks. How'd they do on Arc AGI 2? That is always an interesting one. Um, did they, are we cooked? Did they blow us away? Um, GPT 5.2 thinking is at 52.9% up from 17.6%. That's a huge leap.

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  Wait, we gotta run, we gotta run our, our joke benchmark.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Yes, let's run some of the TVP.

• 1:58:15Speaker 02

  Pull it up, pull it up, Tyler. Try to make us, try to make us laugh.

• 1:58:19John Coogan?

  While we're pulling those up.

• 1:58:20Speaker 02

  Give us tie.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta has AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk.

• 1:58:33Speaker 02

  Okay. So, so yes, this is my benchmark where I ask, uh, to recreate the joke about the, the shrimp fried rice.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:58:39Speaker 02

  So I'll, I'll just go through some of these and you guys, uh, tell me how, how, how good they are.

• 1:58:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:58:44Speaker 02

  You're telling me a crab rang this bell?

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  Crab rang bell?

• 1:58:48Jordi Hays?

  This is thinking, this is 5.2 thinking, right?

• 1:58:51Speaker 02

  This is 5.2 thinking, this is the frontier of AI.

• 1:58:55John Coogan?

  I, I kind of like, you're telling me a crab rang this goon? That's kind of funny.

• 1:58:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's what I would have thought.

• 1:59:01John Coogan?

  But that's not.

• 1:59:02Speaker 02

  You're telling me a bear built this market?

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Oh, because markets can be bullish or bearish? A bear built?

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  You're telling me a ham, you're telling me a ham wrote this lettuce?

• 1:59:13John Coogan?

  A ham, wait, ham wrote this lettuce? Ham wrote lettuce?

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, wait, this is a good one.

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  Terrible has happened.

• 1:59:21Speaker 02

  You're telling me a ghost wrote this script?

• 1:59:24John Coogan?

  Ghost wrote script? Ghost written script?

• 1:59:27Speaker 02

  Ghost written?

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  You're telling me an owl delivered this mail?

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  So I think, um, on, on, on this benchmark, there's more I could, I mean, you could get the picture. I, I think Gemini is still the frontier here.

• 1:59:41John Coogan?

  In terms of, in terms of shrimp fried rice bench?

• 1:59:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  Yes, because.

• 1:59:45Speaker 02

  There were some good ones there.

• 1:59:46John Coogan?

  But, but again, to, to, to understand, it seems like Gemini understood the assignment, but still ultimately leaned on Reddit data and broad internet data and did not come up with any unique joke that had never existed on the internet before.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:00:03John Coogan?

  But it did find the good jokes on the internet.

• 2:00:04Speaker 02

  All of the good ones, um, that it gave me, I could find elsewhere. But, but you still, it, it, you know, it's hard to like, search for that kind of thing because they're not just listed as like, oh, these are jokes like this.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  Shrimp fried rice type jokes, yeah.

• 2:00:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard to look for.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I do wonder if this benchmark.

• 2:00:17Speaker 02

  And also there's a thing where Gemini 3 was actually a new pre-train.

• 2:00:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:20Speaker 02

  At least that's what people are saying, so maybe that was.

• 2:00:21Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's try at least one more.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Wait, I, I wonder if this, if this benchmark is like saturated in the sense that like, every possible shrimp fried rice joke has been said and written down on the internet? Are, is there any new territory? Like, if I put you on this job for a month, could you come up with a new joke that's as funny as shrimp fried rice?

• 2:00:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  You think you could?

• 2:00:40Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Okay, maybe that's a challenge. Do it.

• 2:00:43Speaker 02

  You gotta give me a month. Okay, when we, yeah.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  You have time.

• 2:00:45Speaker 02

  In the new year.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  Okay, I want, I want to give you one thing.

• 2:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Just like adult mode, adult mode and Tyler discovering a new joke, a novel joke are both coming in.

• 2:00:54John Coogan?

  You're telling me there's.

• 2:00:55Jordi Hays?

  By the way, so Stanley, Stanley in the chat says, lol, why don't they swear? Seems pretentious.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  I guess it is pretentious, but I don't care.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's our kids are, our, our kids are watching at home.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, anyway, uh, what's the next joke?

• 2:01:09Jordi Hays?

  You can see a swearing.

• 2:01:10Speaker 02

  You're telling me a chicken actually tendered these?

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  You're telling me a chef boyardee eats ravioli?

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, this is really, really rough.

• 2:01:20Speaker 02

  Oh, wait, this one's not bad, this one's...

• 2:01:22John Coogan?

  Okay, what's this one?

• 2:01:22Speaker 02

  You're telling me a shepherd actually pied this?

• 2:01:25John Coogan?

  Pied this?

• 2:01:28John Coogan?

  They're really food-based. They kind of latch on to the food.

• 2:01:31Speaker 02

  You're telling me a kid napped this?

• 2:01:34John Coogan?

  Kidnapped, okay.

• 2:01:36Speaker 02

  Terrible.

• 2:01:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 2:01:40Speaker 02

  Alright, you just bombed, Tyler. Hopefully 5.3.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  GT3RS bench. Let's do GT3RS bench. This is the benchmark here at TVPN where we ask every frontier model to write unique copy, marketing copy for a GT3RS from Porsche. And we have an astute eye, we watch for any tells that can tell you that this was AI-written. Is it generic? Does it use contrastive parallelism? Does it use antithetical parallelism? Antithetical parallelism is of course when grammatically you say, "It's not this, it's that." It's not just a new AI model, it's an entirely new way of thinking, right? That is contrastive parallelism.

• 2:02:23Speaker 02

  There's a good Wikipedia article, I think is relatively new, where it has a bunch of tells of AI. That has like a bunch more stuff than what we've seen.

• 2:02:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And people were going back and forth with Rune over this, where Rune was saying, "I think you could actually build an AI detector." People were saying, "Well, OpenAI had one of those," and then they took it down because it wasn't working. But it's weird because I feel like, yes, AI-written text should be impossible to detect. Like, we're so past the Turing test. The models are incredible. It really is remarkable. And yet, I can totally tell when people use ChatGPT to write a blog post. It's just obvious. So, anyway, let's do GT3RS bench.

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  There is a, I read a paper like a month ago, and there's this company around it, I think, Pangram, but they do like actually pretty good.

• 2:03:09John Coogan?

  Oh, they do good detection?

• 2:03:10Speaker 02

  Detection, yeah. But do you want me to read the, this is GT3RS bench?

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  Written by either GPT 2.5.2 or handcrafted by a marketing genius. Y'all have to tell us, Jordy. Do you think this was AI or not? Let's read it.

• 2:03:26Speaker 02

  I mean, he just said, he just said it was.

• 2:03:30Speaker 02

  This isn't a car you own.

• 2:03:31John Coogan?

  No!

• 2:03:35John Coogan?

  You're out of the gate with the AI slop.

• 2:03:40Jordi Hays?

  It's not this, it's not. It's not a car you own, it's a car you cherish.

• 2:03:47Speaker 02

  It's a car you own so much as one you operate.

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  Wait, really? That's the first line?

• 2:03:51Speaker 02

  That's the first line.

• 2:03:53John Coogan?

  Wait, operate? That's not even a good line. That's insane.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay, keep going, keep going.

• 2:03:58Speaker 02

  The 911 GT3RS is a Porsche at its most uncompromising.

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  Like that?

• 2:04:03Speaker 02

  A naturally aspirated 4L flat 6 screaming to a 9,000 RPM. Race bred aerodynamics.

• 2:04:10John Coogan?

  Never been in a car before, brother? Never been in a car before?

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  Oh, it's 4 liter.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it stands for liter.

• 2:04:16Speaker 02

  I don't know. A race bred aerodynamics that generate real downforce.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:22Speaker 02

  And a chassis engineered for lap times.

• 2:04:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:25Speaker 02

  Not likes, M dash, not likes.

• 2:04:26Jordi Hays?

  What? That's not even true. It's like the most over, I mean, I shouldn't say it's overhyped, but it's like the most hyped car on the internet. It is engineered for likes.

• 2:04:36John Coogan?

  It is?

• 2:04:37Jordi Hays?

  In some ways, it's, it's like, it's not.

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  It puts up good track times.

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  It's a great track car, but it's...

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  It is engineered. Oh, no, no, no.

• 2:04:44Jordi Hays?

  Most people are buying it for the road, for likes.

• 2:04:47John Coogan?

  We were talking about this with the, with the G-Wagon, like, who's, like, the G-Wagon has a particular, a particular vibe around it now, where it is sort of like an influencer mobile. I think you've made the joke that like, it's the standard issue in LA when you become an influencer, they just, one just shows up, right?

• 2:05:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's partly because the roads in LA are so bad.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:05:07Jordi Hays?

  You need something that, that could off-road in a pinch.

• 2:05:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And so, but the question is like, is that, is that Mercedes designing the G-Wagon for influencers? Like, no. Not at all. It's like, they designed it, they just stuck with it for a long time. Eventually, the influencers adopted it. You can't put that on, on Mercedes. It's not their fault that all the influencers drive them. Anyway.

• 2:05:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:29John Coogan?

  Let's continue with GPT-3RS bench. Is that it? Or is there more?

• 2:05:32Speaker 02

  Uh, no, there's more.

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  Okay, keep reading the slop.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  Every surface has a purpose. Every input is immediate. Every drive feels like a qualifying lap. Built with Wi-Soc level obsession. The three, GT-3RS deletes. Did I also get that wrong?

• 2:05:47John Coogan?

  No, it's okay. It's just like.

• 2:05:48Jordi Hays?

  You just hesitated. You hesitated.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  You, you, you just sound like someone who doesn't talk about Wi-Soc packages very often.

• 2:05:54Speaker 02

  Wi-Soc, okay. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, I guess like Weimar.

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:58Speaker 02

  Uh, the GT-3RS deletes anything unnecessary and doubles down on feel. Lightning fast PDK shifts. Surgical steering.

• 2:06:07Speaker 02

  And, and suspension, suspension tuned straight from the Nürburgring playbook.

• 2:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Playbook?

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  The, the Nürburgring playbook.

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  What is the Nürburgring playbook?

• 2:06:18Speaker 02

  It's loud, stiff, dramatic, M-dash, and utterly alive. This is not a luxury purchase. It's a statement of priorities.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  It's a statement of priorities.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  I don't understand how the it's not this is that is like still in the soup. Like, I, like, just.

• 2:06:34Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  Run it, run the trough through.

• 2:06:36Speaker 02

  It's not a new pre-trained, basically.

• 2:06:38Jordi Hays?

  I think it's one of the. It might be that.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  But it showed up in Gemini 3.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI team low-key hates AI-generated written word as well. And they want to continue to be able to identify it easily.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. I like that.

• 2:06:49Jordi Hays?

  It might be they're, they're.

• 2:06:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:51Jordi Hays?

  Doing a public, uh, service here.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, getbezel.com. Shop over 26,000 luxury watches. Fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Chaching. Uh, ARC Prize is breaking it down. A year ago, we verified a preview of an unreleased version of OpenAI O3 Hi that scored 88% on ARC AGI 1 at an estimate of $4,500 per task. Woo. Today, we verified a new GPT-5, uh, GPT-5.2 Pro X-Hi state-of-the-art score of 90% at $11.64 per task.

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  This represents a 390x efficiency improvement in one year. This is, this is, this is the headline. This is the story. This is the best, this is the best fact, I think, about GPT-5.2. This is massive congratulations to the OpenAI team for delivering at this level. This is remarkable. Really, really great stuff. I love it. Now, go do it for RKGI 3. What have you done for me lately?

• 2:08:01Jordi Hays?

  We, the biggest failure this year was not getting goalposts here in the studio that we can move.

• 2:08:07John Coogan?

  Production team, we need goalposts.

• 2:08:09Jordi Hays?

  Can you order on Amazon right now?

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  Physical goalposts that we can move around the studio every time one of these releases comes out.

• 2:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Like a full-size one?

• 2:08:16John Coogan?

  Uh, no. Something, something that me and Jordi can lift up and move to a different piece of the studio. And then we'll have a sign that has whatever our next goalpost is, you know? RKGI V3. I want them to, you know, one-shot that. And we will move the goalposts over there and then we will erect a new, a new goal. And we will move the goalposts over there on the release of a new model that does, uh, whatever we said was going to impress us, but now no longer is enough to impress us. Well, you know what else is impressive? Uh, this scoop from Reid Albergotti, uh, the tech editor at Semaphore, colleague of Ben Smith.

• 2:09:01John Coogan?

  He says, "Scoop, Google names a new chief to head up its $100 billion a year AI infrastructure buildout. Amin Vadat, who will report to Sundar directly." This is very exciting. Uh, imagine, imagine having a $100 billion budget for CapEx. That's like Ben's dream.

• 2:09:22Jordi Hays?

  Four times NASA's annual budget. Yeah, Ben. If you're really, so Ben's a CapEx guy here. Almost every time he walks up to me, he, he wants another 30 grand for a new camera, this light, this. It's going up next year.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  There's one more. Meanwhile, we are actively on the show asking for goalposts that will probably wind up costing 30k.

• 2:09:48Jordi Hays?

  We're part of the problem.

• 2:09:49John Coogan?

  We are, we are. But you know who's not.

• 2:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Martin Casado says incredibly smart move by Google. Amin is absolutely unique in his academic, technical, operational and business depth. Huge deal.

• 2:10:00John Coogan?

  Well. Uh, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest is Angela from worktrace.ai. She's in the restream waiting room and now she's in the TVP in Ultron. Welcome to the show. How are you doing Angela? Good to meet you.

• 2:10:20Speaker 05

  Doing great. Thanks so much for having me. It's nice to meet you guys.

• 2:10:22John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the news. Please introduce yourself, the company, give us the news. I have a mallet here getting ready to ring the gong.

• 2:10:31Speaker 05

  Yes, I'm Angela, most recently a co-founder of Worktrace AI where we just came out of stealth today. So we're excited to talk to you about it. Um, before this, I was doing a lot of deep learning. So, you know, it was deep learning job after deep learning job. Most recently with that open AI, the last three years, mostly doing product management. Um, and yeah, when I was at open AI, I mean, we were also making these amazing models like they are now more and more, but there is still this gap, you know, that we hear about where people aren't getting their magic moments from AI despite the models being super duper.

• 2:11:08Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty funny. You said, you said you were doing a lot of deep learning as a product manager. Some other product managers are doing a lot of deep research these days where they're effectively glorified deep research. You know, they just.

• 2:11:19Speaker 05

  I do a lot of deep research these days. A lot of my docs are powered by deep research. I have to admit.

• 2:11:25John Coogan?

  So, so, I mean, uh, Sam Altman's been on record before talking about, uh, how not to get steamrolled. Like do if do not start a company that is predicated on the model staying the same capabilities. Like if your whole pitch is I got a new LLM and it does pretty well on RKGI. Well, today was a bad day for you, but there are plenty of other pockets of opportunities. Obviously, open AI believes in you because the open AI fund invested. Um, but how did you think about creating durability or, or positioning the company in a way that was, uh, maybe, uh, you know, synergistic with what open AI is already doing?

• 2:12:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I guess one benchmark for it is that when 5.2 came out today, we were excited to try it.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:12:13Speaker 05

  It was, it's, it's an exciting day for us too.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 2:12:15Speaker 05

  But yeah, when we thought about it, I mean, for me, when I was there, OpenAI is so strong and making just really amazing models. But I feel like they, they themselves, but they also want help from whoever to help distribute these models to the world. I mean, there's so many people that need to benefit from these. And it's very difficult to actually get these into the context of enterprises, real world use cases. It requires a lot of boots on the ground and getting deep into the use cases. Ultimately, they are punching above their weight in terms of how many people they have to get all of the amazing models they have out into the world. And that's something that we felt was super complimentary to them.

• 2:12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Walk me through the product experience, how a company might actually integrate Worktrace and, and start building a, you know, a bespoke workflow over time. What's the, what's the actual like diffusion process into an organization to start getting value?

• 2:13:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you about what I think the status quo is, which is what I saw when I was a product manager, which is that a team comes in, they know that AI could be transformative for their industry. And so they want to invest in it. However, they're keeping, keeping up with what is going on with the latest 5.2 model. What does that mean for them? They're keeping up with what's actually going on in their workforce. And so what they often do is they bring in consultants or tech services company or the OpenAI go to market team to be able to figure out what is the exact right use cases that they should apply this particular model. Or they model, they know that that's going to come out in three months to these particular teams that they know need help.

• 2:14:01Speaker 05

  So that takes like months as far as my experience has gone. Whereas with Worktrace, what we do is what we're able to do is like have a desktop app to be able to see, you know, what work is going on and then be able to flag that, hey, this is tasks that seem repetitive, that you seem to be spending a lot of time on, that are breaking your flow. That 5.2 happens to be very, very good at today. Why don't you consider building out a workflow with 5.2 for this exact use case? So what that looks like then is like a prioritized list of use cases. So a roadmap basically for AI transformation for a company. And then for each of those use cases, it'll have actually the JSON

• 2:14:44Speaker 05

  or the output that you need to input into OpenAI Agent Builder to actually start running an agent for that workflow.

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  That's interesting. How do you deal with the scenario where the system is observing a workflow? And in the process of that identification of a workflow, it is, it becomes clear that the person should just be using SaaS instead of like, like if somebody is like, oh yeah, every day they open a spreadsheet and they have a list of people's names and phone numbers and how recently they contacted them, like that might just be a sales opportunity to get them on a CRM. You don't necessarily need to agentically build a new CRM maybe. But how do you deal with those scenarios? Because there's a lot of companies where they're, they're not even on the frontier of SaaS implementation.

• 2:15:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, and there's a lot of like, kind of like industry-wide process mining tools that look for like bottlenecks in your work or maybe where you should use those other tools. And so, you know, despite how good the models are, most of your work today probably can't be done with agents. There's a huge amount that can be though. And like, that's specifically what we're looking to find. So we'll mine for the ones that can today be used for agents. And we're making a bet that that amount will just get larger and larger over time.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, and do you think that you have to live on the desktop in an app? Because I imagine that if my workflow is, is slow, but it's taking place inside of like, you know, the Salesforce ecosystem or something, they're not just going to let you build something on top or will they? Like, how, how does AI bump into these like walled gardens that are going to prop up in enterprise software where, you know, Marc Benioff is probably thinking like, I don't want you puppeteering my software. I want to be the one doing that.

• 2:16:30Speaker 05

  I see. I mean, for us, I mean, to understand how work happens.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:34Speaker 05

  It's best to be able to just see what you see when you're doing work.

• 2:16:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:38Speaker 05

  Which honestly is more than your desktop. It's like also your phone.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  Your phone, yeah.

• 2:16:42Speaker 05

  You know, it's like what, like, you know, you in meetings and whatnot. However, you know, we find that we go a long way by seeing just what's happening on your desktop to get a sense of how your work is going. In terms of actually then doing the tasks, I mean, we still use the tools that you use. You know, we integrate them with Salesforce or any of the normal tools that you might be using because, I mean, that is just how work happens and we want to, we want to meet you where your work is.

• 2:17:07Jordi Hays?

  Do you, uh, do you think some people that are aggressively pursuing a forward deployed model are going to look at your solution and think like, oh, maybe I didn't need to send my most valuable human capital out into the world? I could have just sent an app, a screen recorder. Cause it, cause it feels like this is like a potentially a more, at least for a lot of different types of work, a much more elegant solution than let's fly this person out, put them in a, in a short-term rental or a hotel. Let's have them just sit in the office when you can actually just use, in order to implement AI, when you can use AI to basically watch someone's screen and discover what these workflows actually look like.

• 2:17:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, part of it is that, and there's not that many AI experts in the world for what we need. There's not that many FDEs that we could deploy out. So most of the companies that we're working with probably can't afford FDEs for, to come over, you know, for a couple of months at a time, but also continuously as AI changes. But also, yeah, at the same time, when we were thinking about what we were doing to help companies get up to date on AI, we were listening to their workflows. We were understanding their workflows, breaking it down, looking at variations, which just happens to be something that AI is particularly good at. So when we, when we saw like what it took to actually find use cases and then put them in the format that agent builders needed,

• 2:18:29Speaker 05

  it just felt like that in and of itself was a great use case for AI, which is actually what made us super bullish to pursue this idea.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  Get us up to speed on the fundraising history. I want to know what the latest news is.

• 2:18:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. So we recently closed our seed round, which we're super duper excited about.

• 2:18:47Jordi Hays?

  How much?

• 2:18:49Speaker 05

  Nine million.

• 2:18:50Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool. I'm super excited about this. I love when an idea is obvious and you just sit here thinking, why didn't anybody do this before? And sometimes it just takes the right team to come along and do it.

• 2:19:08John Coogan?

  And look at who's in this deal. ABC conviction, OpenAI, Logan Kilpatrick's in, big fan of him. Mira Murati, wow, you really...

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Murderers Row.

• 2:19:18John Coogan?

  Murderers Row.

• 2:19:19Jordi Hays?

  Genius Ventures. I'm an LP, so yeah, very, very excited.

• 2:19:26John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us.

• 2:19:31Jordi Hays?

  I have a feeling you'll be back for the A within a quarter.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:19:36Jordi Hays?

  I just got a feeling.

• 2:19:37Speaker 05

  Hoping for it too, hoping to see you guys soon.

• 2:19:39John Coogan?

  Also, the chat is obsessed with you. They think that you should go on Joe Rogan, apparently, which I don't know why, but I do think that would be a fun, a fun thing. So, good luck to you on the rest of the media tour. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Merry Christmas.

• 2:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:19:54John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Aidsleep.com, exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. I'm getting back in it.

• 2:20:05Jordi Hays?

  Your fall off needs to be studied.

• 2:20:06John Coogan?

  My fall off needed to be studied. It's very clear what happened. I flew to New York City and I slept in a bunk bed, which was not ideal. Randomly, I wound up in one hotel room, four bunk beds.

• 2:20:19Jordi Hays?

  We didn't book the hotel.

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  None of them fit me. It was a mess.

• 2:20:21Jordi Hays?

  The hotel room was booked by another company.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  It was a mistake. Yeah, it was not, it was not Nick. Nick is fantastic hotel.

• 2:20:27Jordi Hays?

  What'd you get, though? What'd you get?

• 2:20:28John Coogan?

  I got an 87. What'd you get?

• 2:20:30Jordi Hays?

  Ooh, beat me. I got an 80. I'll get a 2.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  I'm back. I'm back, baby. Never challenge me at sleep. Never go snooze for snooze with me, because I will out snooze you. And next, we are joined by John from Scrub Capital. John is a practicing neurosurgeon, health system leader, multi-time co-founder.

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:20:49John Coogan?

  CMO.

• 2:20:50Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:20:51John Coogan?

  And more. Welcome to the street.

• 2:20:52Jordi Hays?

  How are you guys?

• 2:20:53John Coogan?

  We're fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Can you get us up to speed on some of the writing that you've been doing, some of the, some of your, your overall thinking on how America is misunderstanding self-driving cars, what we need to change the actual message, the status quo, and then the message that we need to get out?

• 2:21:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. So, look, up until right around now, we've been thinking about autonomous vehicles as a tech moonshot. You know, cool tech story, take shots at it, like it, whatever side you're on. But, but what I'm trying to say, and now others are joining too, is this is a public health urgency now. Because what happened is Waymo put out data at 100 million miles. This is about a month or two ago. You can go download and analyze it yourself. They put out all the raw data. And what I found was astonishing. We're facing, guys, the possibility that if we play our cards right now going forward, we could eliminate traffic deaths as a leading cause of death in the United States.

• 2:21:58John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Wait, it's the leading cause? I thought it was cancer.

• 2:22:01Speaker 06

  As a leading cause.

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  As a leading cause. Yeah. It's huge, though. Isn't it tens of thousands of people?

• 2:22:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, 40,000 a year. For children and young adults, it's the number two cause of death in the United States, and it's the number one worldwide for children.

• 2:22:15John Coogan?

  And it also, I mean, not all life is precious, obviously, but it also must be a cause of death of young people, because it's so random. When it happens, it's not, it's not something where, you know, oh, someone's lived their full life and then they passed away.

• 2:22:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's right. It does tend to bias towards younger people, healthier prime of life. It's not like it's, this tends to be the sick and elderly, that's for sure.

• 2:22:37John Coogan?

  So, but I'm totally with you. I buy it, hook, line, and sinker. I'm a believer. But also, it seems like it's going fine, because like, Google has a trillion dollars of cash flow, and they're gonna do this, and Waymo is rolling out. Like, what do we really need to change? It seems like everything's going well.

• 2:22:57Speaker 06

  Right. So, look, we have a regulatory capture problem right now, guys, and that's why I was so glad to come on TVPN. You could look at coverage in the Washington Post, coverage in the Boston Globe. City councils and other moneyed forces have politicians' ears, and they're working against this. And, and I think, you know, it's, we gotta work to liberate this and get the message out that this is, this is not a risk story. This is a safety story, you know, from my perspective now, looking at this from a medical lens. And, you know, I haven't even scratched the surface, and I'm sure I'm gonna get all flamed on Twitter now and everything else. Plaintiff bar in a lot of places is what's opposing this as well. And, and I won't impute motive, but people can use their imaginations.

• 2:23:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so what's happening in California that allows me to, every other week I log on, I see that Waymo's map is expanding. California historically has been, I don't know, I would imagine that this would be a tougher environment than other states that are less population dense.

• 2:24:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, Jordy, what's interesting about this is this doesn't respect traditional political tribes, or left coast, right coast, whatever. It actually, it cuts jagged across typical tribes often. So like, you could have far-left people where they love bikes, but love that Waymos are safer. So it's like, great. But then there's a group over there that doesn't want any vehicles, so Waymos are a problem. Then you might have libertarians that say, you know, "Technology acceleration, let's go, let's go, let's go." But then, well, wait, are the vehicles surveilling me? So, you know, this is not traditional tribes. And I think what we're seeing now is the data is moving people further and further along in this story, tribe independent. And to get to your question, Jordy, I think a lot of these companies are

• 2:24:45Speaker 06

  based, or, sorry, Waymo certainly is based in California, and there's a west coast heaviness to this. And to be fair, Tesla's now, you know, also demoing this in Austin right now with human drivers still.

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  Do you have any other reads on how this might break from a regulation perspective? It feels like, you know, we could be coming up on a seatbelts-in-car scenario where, you know, self-driving technology is a requirement for all the OEMs, and they have to either white-label it from Waymo, white-label it from Tesla, it needs to be available more widely. Tesla and Waymo, I don't think that's in their business model. I don't think they necessarily want to put it in every Toyota and Honda, but you're making a...

• 2:25:31Jordi Hays?

  Rolls-Royce Ghosts.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're making like a health-based case, and maybe at a certain point, there needs to be, you know, a requirement. How do you think about that?

• 2:25:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, so right, like airbags, we all remember or some do that, you know, they started as kind of like a luxury thing on the high end. S-Class Mercedes and then worked their way down. I think we're going to progressively see this with progressively more and more automation. So right now, like the automatic braking is in there and almost everybody has that. But it's going to start to filter down and Jordi and John, I think insurance industry pressure is going to push this too.

• 2:26:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:07Speaker 06

  Where eventually when the data gets stronger and stronger, and I think we're about a couple of weeks away from Google's next, sorry, Waymo's next data dump. Cause just following their usual trend, I think we're a couple of weeks away from probably 125 million miles. I think that this data is going to start to push rate differential over time and that that's going to kind of get people moving.

• 2:26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's funny. If you were expecting a debate, you're not going to get one because I agree with everything you're saying here. But you did go to the New York Times to write this essay. Did you get pushback from the New York Times readership? Was there, was that a conscious choice? I'm just trying to understand like who is, who is the current, what is the current shape of the, of the anti self-driving car? Constituency look like? Because I'm starting to understand the anti, you know, AI data center constituency and I get that like. It's, it's ugly in your backyard or if you, if your, if your power rates go up like that makes sense. There's a trade off there. But who's, who's not happy? What was the reaction to the New York Times piece?

• 2:27:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. So the New York Times was interesting and I'll tell you, there was a very famous magazine that I pitched this to, and they weren't interested because they were writing their own.

• 2:27:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:18Speaker 06

  And this one definitely got, got a lot more traction. But so the, the, the team there was the crack editors, obviously. And the fact checking is incredible. I mean, I knew it was good, but I mean, every word, every statistic checked twice, it seems. And I think, I don't know if that's just because this is a super, you know, high impact story or because it's what we do. But when I was watching, they actually shut down the message board when it got to about 2,400 messages. They might've been tired of moderating it. And I saw, you know, really these, again, these jagged splits where I guess it's. Sort of obliquely cutting across groups and I I'm having trouble now. I understand there's some data coming out that it actually tends to cut across tech literacy.

• 2:28:04Speaker 06

  So more so than like left, right libertarian not it's it's how tech literate you are. And that that's going to get progressively interesting, I think.

• 2:28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think about the job displacement narrative around self-driving cars? That does feel like, you know, there are people whose jobs are to drive around. Some of them will be potentially displaced. It certainly has an effect on the taxicab market. Self-driving cars in other contexts are still seems like it's pretty far away. But how how do you think about balancing the the economic effects, the employment effects with the, you know, the the health benefits effectively?

• 2:28:41Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we we this is a critical question. I want to make sure that's clear, right? This isn't just willy-nilly, let's go put these everywhere tomorrow. The call is for this to be done smartly, starting like yesterday, right? And let's make this a national priority. And the job question's critical and and I want to ever be glib about it. I wrote a whole kind of mini thesis and there wasn't room for it in the piece. And I'm certainly not a labor expert, but what I think is a couple of things. One, we're already facing a labor shortage in a lot of markets, as you know, not a surplus. And we have supply chain and value chain breaking because of this. So I think what I'm looking here is we have a chance if we do this right with upskilling and other things, and I know upskilling gets panned a lot of the time. But I think we need to be thinking about moving people from operator to manager,

• 2:29:26Speaker 06

  supervising fleets of vehicles. And we could have a truck driver managing a fleet of 10 autonomous rigs, you know, from a command center, who, by the way, now goes to sleep in his own bed rather than hers or rather than staring at a white line for 11 straight hours in a dangerous environment. I think that's a waste of human potential. Now, I want to be clear, their jobs are super important right now. They're keeping the country alive. So nobody here that I'm saying that their job is a waste of human potential. I'm saying if we just then don't figure out what to do with their jobs, because this is happening whether we like it or not. We need to think about how to use that incredible expertise and apply it smartly. And then, you know, I'd like to say.

• 2:30:09Speaker 06

  In 1981 was the peak cigarette manufacturer. 650 billion cigarettes were manufactured in 1981. Now we're down to 125 billion cigarettes a year. And we, none of us heard about an epidemic of job displacement because of cigarettes being dropped by 85%.

• 2:30:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:31Speaker 06

  So let's do this right, starting today, and I don't know if you're going to go there, but if we don't, we're going to be importing Chinese technology. They have no less than seven companies pursuing full stack autonomous vehicles right now.

• 2:30:48Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense, and I'm glad.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  If I can name more than seven American autonomy companies, Waymo, Tesla, Comet AI, Ghost is not, well, there's a couple that are not doing okay anymore, but it is.

• 2:31:01Jordi Hays?

  Cacers, what? Cacers company?

• 2:31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, applied intuition.

• 2:31:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, I wanted, while we have you, I wanted your quick take on peptides. We're seeing an explosion of demand. You're an investor in, in, in a bunch of different health and medical companies. I'm curious how you've viewed this category. It's, uh, it feels tough to invest in for a lot of reasons. Regulatory, a lot of these therapies are not actually proven by any type of real studies, but I'm curious if you got a hot take for us.

• 2:31:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I don't know if it's a hot take, but look, so first of all, disclosure, we're investors in Life Force. Certainly check out Life Force, um, and, but, so, um, I've joked and others have that, remember this old book, Prozac Nation? I think the new, I, I want, I wish I had time to write Peptide Nation. Like, one of us need, or may, let's do it together. I, we need to make time for that, but this is where we're going. And the data is getting stronger and stronger in pockets. As a physician, I gotta say, I'm not giving anybody medical advice right now. Talk to your own doctor, but me and Chrissy Farr, and you can Google this, we surveyed. 135 clinicians who are active in health span on what they do themselves, not what they do for their

• 2:32:26Speaker 06

  patients, what they take themselves. And something like 15 or 20% of them are on more than one injectable, including peptide, of course, TRT and other things. And I, I think

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  I like a Jack doctor personally.

• 2:32:41Speaker 06

  There's

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  I, I, I, you can't get me in the clinic if he's over 10% body fat. He's got to be dried out. He's got to be diced. Yeah.

• 2:32:50Speaker 06

  Right. He's got to be solid separation.

• 2:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Gotta be a mass monster.

• 2:32:53John Coogan?

  It's gotta be stringy.

• 2:32:54Speaker 06

  Is it okay if he's cutting and bulking? Or does it just, when he's cutting?

• 2:32:57John Coogan?

  I typically only go in for the check-in when he's on a cut, when he's in fighting form, kind of stage ready.

• 2:33:03Speaker 06

  When you're making your appointment, you almost need to know where are they?

• 2:33:06John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. Miss me when you're bulking. I want to see you.

• 2:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Want to see the striation.

• 2:33:10John Coogan?

  Ready to go to the Arnold, to the Arnold Classic. I want you stage ready. I want you dry.

• 2:33:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because, because bodybuilders are the epitome of health.

• 2:33:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 2:33:20Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Robbie's looking great.

• 2:33:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's ready.

• 2:33:23Speaker 06

  You are looking great.

• 2:33:24John Coogan?

  Anyway, this is fantastic. Uh, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 2:33:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're, we're with you. I think, I think it's a, I think it's a good reframing. There's so much, uh,

• 2:33:32John Coogan?

  I like it a lot.

• 2:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so much investment happening in, in AI broadly. And it, it is interesting that, and, and how much the government is doing to try to, uh, break down walls to, to support the industry.

• 2:33:45John Coogan?

  It is funny. There's all this, there's all this, uh, there's all this debate about like, will AI cure cancer? Will AI save lives? Like, is that just lip service from the big AI companies? And it's like, well, this one could literally save 40,000 lives a year. Like, that's, that's good. That's more than many cancers. That's a ton. That's, there's no reason why we shouldn't do that. And then, and then we should celebrate it as AI saving lives. Like, that would be great.

• 2:34:08Speaker 06

  It's more than homicide and plane crashes combined every year.

• 2:34:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:12Speaker 06

  And if I could leave one thing I would say to folks. Look, this is not something that, oh, my God, Waymo started on this and Tesla started on this, you know, six months ago, and it looks great. This has been 15 years of deliberate work at Waymo. And I don't work for Waymo. I want to be clear, I'm not invested in Waymo unless it's through a mutual fund at Alphabet indirectly or whatever. But this, this has been handled for 15 years. With the rigor of what I would say is most analogous to a medical device.

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:34:39Speaker 06

  Not an app, not like a wearable, an actually regulated medical device. So what I want to say to people is that this is a moment now.

• 2:34:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:48Speaker 06

  That's ready for safe and effective acceleration.

• 2:34:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's been so, it's been incredibly high stakes. Like, there have been multiple, I'm pretty sure multiple, artificial intelligence self-driving companies where they've had a terrible accident and it's basically destroyed the entire company. And so, the entire industry has moved slowly, but in this case, it's good because there is human life on the line. I would call it deliberate movement, and I completely agree with you.

• 2:35:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, look, this, do this right, and this will be remembered as one of the historic, top three moments of American exceptionalism, if we don't let it slip out of our hands.

• 2:35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 2:35:30Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:35:31John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:35:32Jordi Hays?

  We'll have you back on soon.

• 2:35:34Speaker 06

  Thanks a lot, Jonathan.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  Hop in that Waymo, head over to wander.com, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, and you can get there in your self-driving car. Our next guest is Aaron Cannon.

• 2:35:55Jordi Hays?

  That is a powerful name.

• 2:35:56John Coogan?

  That's a powerful name.

• 2:35:57Jordi Hays?

  Scrub Capital.

• 2:35:59John Coogan?

  They saw him, and they were like, put the capital, put the capital in the cannon, launch the capital cannon, at Aaron Cannon, welcome to the show, how you doing?

• 2:36:09Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, thank you guys. And look at that chart in the background.

• 2:36:11John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:36:12Jordi Hays?

  Cheeky little chart. Guys, that's real numbers, that's actually, that's the real data. Real data. Hit it again, hit it again, a few times.

• 2:36:24Jordi Hays?

  There we go, we're fired up, Aaron Cannon, we're happy to have you on the show. Thank you. Would love, would love an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 2:36:34Aaron Cannon?

  Yeah, I'm Aaron. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Outset. I was on your show, I think it was at YC Demo Day like six months ago.

• 2:36:40Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right. We were super bullish on you. No wonder you're back. No wonder you're back.

• 2:36:47Aaron Cannon?

  I had my my yellow ramp hat on in the YC offices and I was I was sharing our Series A.

• 2:36:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so so break it down for people because they're going to assume you were in the in a batch this year, but you you you went through in 2022, was it?

• 2:37:00Aaron Cannon?

  Yeah, we're 2023, summer 23, we went through YC batch and been growing since then. I just happened to be in the office and we raised our Series A at the at the YC Demo Day, so I popped in. And yes, so Outset is AI moderated research. So if you've ever tried to, you know, understand your customers or something, it's it really sucks today or or in the past. And finally, it doesn't suck. I mean, basically, you know, surveys are the old school way to do it. Or you talk to users one by one and, you know, talk to maybe a dozen or so and and now AI does it for you. So our that's what our platform does. And we we just raised our Series B, announced it yesterday from Radical Ventures. There it is.

• 2:37:41Aaron Cannon?

  And yeah, it's been great. So here we are, six months later.

• 2:37:46Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever was Paul Graham ever concerned about Outset? Was he worried, you know, founders might stop talking to their customers? Or is he comfortable with the AI talking to the customer on their behalf?

• 2:37:58Aaron Cannon?

  I didn't clear this with with PG personally, but.

• 2:38:01Jordi Hays?

  Dude, you gotta clear it with you gotta clear it with PG. You gotta get his blessing. You gotta get his blessing.

• 2:38:06Aaron Cannon?

  I did not do that, but it's part of the reason we don't work as much with startups and and we work with Microsoft, Google, folks like that. Weight watchers and Nestle and so so we go for the big enterprises.

• 2:38:19Jordi Hays?

  What does what does success look like when when you're working with these companies? What are you pushing towards? Is it a key insight that impacts a a future product decision? You know, what does actually winning look like?

• 2:38:34Aaron Cannon?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a it generally falls into two things like either they're doing product research where it's about a key insight that drives a product decision of what to build or even like not to build. There's like a famous Airbnb Brian Chesky told the story of like there was like a million dollar yeah research saved the millions of dollars because of like one bad design, right? And so like, you know, it could be a massive like a single insight can be hugely differentiating for a product. And then there's marketing where you're saying like, I'm about to, you know, release a new product to a new market, you know, you're Nestle and you're testing new concepts. You got to get that right, right? So that's that looks like making smarter decisions and making them really, really fast. And that's like the real thing is that now with us, you can actually gather, you

• 2:39:18Aaron Cannon?

  know, hundreds of actual interviews, like in-depth, nuanced, like really hear from people and you could do that in a couple of hours. And then we synthesize all that data so you can go make a decision.

• 2:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys taking away jobs from researchers or are researchers just able to do far more work and get far more insight?

• 2:39:35Aaron Cannon?

  The the classic AI question of, yeah, it's so the reality is like

• 2:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it just feels like, yeah, I mean, if you look in engineering organizations, people are like, my engineers are much more effective. I'm gonna make I'm gonna build a lot more product. I want more great engineers. In this case, I I don't have a lot of insight into how research teams at some of these big companies work, but I could see them saying, hey, we historically needed to hire this outside firm to conduct this research or and we needed X number of people to kind of manage it and try to unpack what was actually happening.

• 2:40:09John Coogan?

  A lot of them might also have just been using web forms, right?

• 2:40:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:12Aaron Cannon?

  Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what we actually see on the ground is very much not the get rid of your researchers, quite the opposite. And I think the the reason for that is there is like, there isn't, there isn't a ceiling of like, I don't need any more insight on a thing. Right, there's actually kind of, it's like an insatiable demand for it. The problem is the old way was not economical. So you have, you know, your researchers, you know, they do one study every month or two and it would be, you know, like talking to 15 users. And now that one researcher can actually do a study every week, each time talking to 200 users. And so you basically are like making smarter decisions. And then you add the speed at which people are putting new products into the world. You actually need that insight faster, right?

• 2:40:55Aaron Cannon?

  And so what we see on the ground is basically a research team adopting it and saying, holy crap, like I can actually go like do twice as much or go twice as fast. Um, with, you know, the same people we have on the team today.

• 2:41:07John Coogan?

  How multimodal are you today? How multimodal do you want to be in a few years? I can imagine, uh, research is happening, you know, on video interviews, audio, text-based interviews, web forums, like what are you doing today and then what do you want to do?

• 2:41:24Aaron Cannon?

  Uh, we, we, we want to do all the modes, all the modals. Um, you know, so today we are video, audio, text, and then you, you can do kind of forums, you know, think like classic survey questions.

• 2:41:35John Coogan?

  Like radio buttons and.

• 2:41:36Aaron Cannon?

  Radio buttons.

• 2:41:37Jordi Hays?

  So do you just email or text a customer and say, may I research you?

• 2:41:43Aaron Cannon?

  Yeah, that's exactly it. That's the language. May I research you? Um, no, but, but then, but then we also do screen sharing. So that's actually where you're, you're getting a, a participant to video, audio, radio buttons, and then also share their screen while they're interacting with your prototype. Um, so you got to do all of that together. And then we partner with a bunch of, a, a bunch of, uh, panels that are calling to, to help kind of source people, right? So in our platform, we can actually source from, you know, millions of people.

• 2:42:10John Coogan?

  And are you building like the full customer experience management platform down to, uh, data collection, but then also analysis? Because it sounds like you're adding sourcing, but it's not like you're, you're going to give me a big bag of text and then I gotta go sort it out elsewhere?

• 2:42:29Aaron Cannon?

  Yeah, the the theory's always been like the the if we're gonna help you scale and speed up the way you collect the data, we gotta break it down for you afterwards, right? And it's just two sides of the same coin. So since day one, we've had these two sides, right? Our core platform, AI Moderator Research, is like, collect the data, synthesize the data, tell you what matters. The thing we now are building into the future, and the reason we raised a bunch of this money, you know, just six months later, is like, we're going from, think like, you know, study by study, I got a question, let me go answer it, to the always-on customer intelligence platform, right? The the experience management where, you know, at every touch point, you know, you get off a flight, you get a, oh, how was your flight? Or you, you know, you you you get a post-purchase feedback form, and really, every point in the journey, right?

• 2:43:12Aaron Cannon?

  Should actually be conversational insight, should be continuous, we should have contextual questions that actually make sense, and so pulling all that together.

• 2:43:20Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense.

• 2:43:23John Coogan?

  I, I, sorry, I have one more, uh, fraud detection, like, what does that look like? And, yeah, like, is the, is that AI-powered or AI-enabled, or is that just like best practices? Like, what what is the bad, like, how big of a problem is fraud in customer research?

• 2:43:40Aaron Cannon?

  Yeah, if you talk to anybody in the in the industry, they'll say like, it's a big, it's a problem, and ChatGPT made it worse, right?

• 2:43:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:47Aaron Cannon?

  Um, so the answer though-

• 2:43:49Jordi Hays?

  Is that, what is that?

• 2:43:50John Coogan?

  Because I get paid a hundred dollars to tell Microsoft, or get a gift card to tell Microsoft how I'm using Microsoft Excel, and I'm like, well, if I just go to ChatGPT, and I'm like, how am I using Excel? It'll just make something up, and then I just copy paste that in, and then I get the hundred dollar Starbucks gift card. Is that roughly correct?

• 2:44:05Aaron Cannon?

  Yeah, that's that's right. But but what happens is like on surveys, it's really bad, right? Because you have an open, a free text field, and you just paste it in.

• 2:44:12John Coogan?

  You just text it, whatever, yeah.

• 2:44:14Aaron Cannon?

  Right. Well, like, luckily, because most of our customers are doing very like video-based stuff, it is much more, right? That that is harder to like, uh, you know, fake your way through. But we built our own fraud detection agent, right? And it's like, it's actually kind of fun to watch, because it's basically looking at your screener answers, like, oh, you said you were an expert in, you know, Python, and then like later in the interview, as they interviewed about, you know, what tools you're using, it's like, they don't know anything about it. And then you get your, you know, as a customer, you get your reasoning, so that the AI agent tells you, oh, this this guy does not know what he's talking about. And so it's, uh, pretty impressive, yeah.

• 2:44:48John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Do we hit the dong already?

• 2:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Hit it again.

• 2:44:53John Coogan?

  I'll hit it again.

• 2:44:54Jordi Hays?

  We did. Yeah, hit it one more. Hit it again. I'll be back.

• 2:44:56John Coogan?

  Thirty million dollar series. I don't know if we actually got to the number. Thirty million dollars.

• 2:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Come back and hey, push yourself in the team. Come back in Q1. It's not all about fundraising, but it is a pretty good indicator of momentum.

• 2:45:09John Coogan?

  Call up Rob Taves at Radical Ventures, say, "Give me another thirty. Give me another thirty."

• 2:45:13Jordi Hays?

  How about three hundred?

• 2:45:14John Coogan?

  How about, yeah. How about you put your money where your mouth is, Rob? Make a bet.

• 2:45:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:18John Coogan?

  Take a bet on us.

• 2:45:19Jordi Hays?

  Look at that graph.

• 2:45:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, look at the graph. Look at the graph. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you again.

• 2:45:23John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Uh, before we bring in our next guest, we have some breaking news. Broadcom has smashed earnings. Earnings per share of one ninety-five versus one seventy-two projected. Revenue of eighteen billion. People were projecting eighteen, seventeen and a half. Look at this AI image of a crying bear relative to AVG. Oh, God.

• 2:45:47Jordi Hays?

  Bears in Shambles.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  The CEP board of private equity has done it again.

• 2:45:53Jordi Hays?

  Up three percent.

• 2:45:54John Coogan?

  The green line is, I like the LoJack riding the green line upwards.

• 2:45:58Jordi Hays?

  After hours, sorry.

• 2:46:00John Coogan?

  Uh, and that is fantastic news for the good folks over at Broadcom. Congratulations to everyone on smashing earnings. And thank you to the chat for calling it out. Our next guest is from K2 Space. How you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  Uh, we are trying to pull up some audio. Do we have audio here? Can we play this?

• 2:46:20Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:46:20John Coogan?

  Oh, sorry. Thank you. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:46:24Speaker 08

  Hey, guys. I'm Karan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of K2 Space.

• 2:46:27John Coogan?

  Uh, and can, I mean, obviously, space is in the news, but can you give us a little bit more color on, uh, how you fit into the orbital economy?

• 2:46:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. So about three and a half years ago, I started this company with my brother, Neil. Um, we wanted to build really large, really high-power satellites, which at the time was a pretty big contrarian bet against the market. Everyone was kind of going smaller with their satellites.

• 2:46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:48Speaker 08

  And so we kind of looked at it. We were like, hey, like, actually, the future, if you think about it, is all about higher power, right? And we're seeing that, but things that we're probably about to talk about with.

• 2:46:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, the data centers and space stuff.

• 2:46:59Speaker 08

  And everything. But, uh, but yeah, we're building the largest space platforms that have ever existed.

• 2:47:03John Coogan?

  The largest space. So, uh, but, but, but importantly, you're not building the rockets.

• 2:47:09Speaker 08

  That's right. Yeah, we're just doing the satellites. We're going to be launch vehicle agnostic. Most of our first missions are going to be on SpaceX.

• 2:47:15John Coogan?

  On SpaceX.

• 2:47:16Speaker 08

  SpaceX rockets, but over time we'll probably use a bunch of others.

• 2:47:18John Coogan?

  And when you were building the company, did you have a, did you have a thesis around how the launch market would play out? Because there's, I feel like maybe this came up when you were pitching VCs, but there was, there's probably a risk that, hey, if SpaceX becomes like a really powerful monopoly, they are going to be able to squeeze you like crazy. So was your initial thinking or bet, hey, I love SpaceX. It's amazing. It's unlocking an incredible new capability. But I do think that, you know, Firefly will be doing some stuff. Rocket Lab might be doing stuff. Uh, Blue Origin might be doing stuff and eventually the market will play out that I can actually carve out a business here. One way or another.

• 2:48:02Speaker 08

  I mean, 70% of our company comes from SpaceX. My, my brother is an ex SpaceXer. So we're all, we're all pretty big fans of SpaceX. And, you know, it, it, they've made such a massive difference in the market, right? Like when we talk about there being like launch abundance, right? It's both because they made bigger and bigger launch vehicles and they increased the frequency of those launches, right? Like they're, they're blowing past 150 launches this year as if it's nothing, right?

• 2:48:24John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 2:48:25Speaker 08

  So, so we always knew that we were going to be big users. Yeah. We always knew we were going to be big users of SpaceX rockets, but I think it's pretty cool to see a bunch of the other launch players coming online. Right? Like there's a number of new players, whether it's like Relativity, whether it's Andy or it's Stoke, um, whether it's the folks over at Firefly. Um, I think it's, it's, it's a really unique opportunity we have right now where yeah, hopefully five to 10 years from now, we have a bunch of choices.

• 2:48:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. So, so, so biggest, big satellites, been in the, in the business and making big satellites. What was the first big satellite that you thought would be valuable? Communications, put a camera on it, spy satellites, Hubble telescope? What do you, what were you originally thinking, uh, before every venture capitalist said pivot to AI?

• 2:49:07Speaker 08

  So we started with giant telescopes.

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  Telescopes.

• 2:49:09Speaker 08

  Bit of an extreme departure from AI. But yeah, we wanted to build really large telescopes because everyone knows James Webb, right?

• 2:49:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:18Speaker 08

  Awesome, highly performing telescope. But it cost billions of dollars and took like 20 years to produce, right? And that's like kind of the straw by which we take data from the rest of the solar system, right? And so we wanted to build many more straws and many bigger straws. Over time, we realized like, actually, if we go bigger, well, now we can start to deploy a lot of power because we can host bigger solar arrays. And if we go bigger, we can build platforms that are radiation tolerant and can handle different orbits in different parts of the solar system. But it all actually stemmed from giant telescopes, which is a little known fact, actually, back eight years.

• 2:49:51John Coogan?

  But I mean, the news today, $250 million to $3 billion valuation doesn't look like a science project type funding round. You got T. Rowe Price, altimeter, light speed.

• 2:50:03Jordi Hays?

  T. Rowe Price, what does that look like?

• 2:50:06John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  Typically, wouldn't that be pretty common in a pre-IPO?

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  It's like a grow, yeah, these are serious investors. So what is the shape of the business? I imagine that like you actually have serious traction and progress, actually delivering capabilities. What's the majority of the customer base product mix look like right now?

• 2:50:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, so because we went in such a different direction, we started as like just a tactical contrarian bet that two and a half years ago started to get a lot of commercial traction. So over the last three years, we've basically gone from $5 million in TCB in '23 to $50 million in TCB in '24 to $500 billion in TCB in '25, right? And this is from a mix of large, commercial and government customers, right? And I don't know that many green after your company old companies that are like half a billion in TCB, right?

• 2:50:56John Coogan?

  That's insane. So yeah, take me inside one of those contracts. Give me an example of like what you're delivering.

• 2:51:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the perfect example of power is when you think about communications, right?

• 2:51:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:51:07Speaker 08

  More power equals more throughput.

• 2:51:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:51:09Speaker 08

  So if I drive up the power, right, any space-based data constellation suddenly gets more and more effective.

• 2:51:15John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:51:15Speaker 08

  Right? And we, we were just like driving up the power incrementally, right? Like the typical satellites at the same price point as us were doing like one to two kilowatts of power. Our first satellite is 20 kilowatts of power.

• 2:51:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:51:27Speaker 08

  Our next satellite's going to be 100.

• 2:51:29John Coogan?

  100?

• 2:51:29Speaker 08

  And so we saw a really interesting use case to go after, which is just for all the players that are looking at what SpaceX has done to the comms market.

• 2:51:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:37Speaker 08

  And are thinking about how to reset their unit economics. We were like the really interesting path for them to take to be able to think about a fundamentally different cost structure, just based on how much power we were deploying and at the price point.

• 2:51:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:51:48Speaker 08

  So commercial comms in the first place, government is the second, and I can talk a bit about that. But those are the two big areas that we've kind of focused on as we scaled up the company.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's flip over to the, the engineering side. A hundred kilowatts, that's point one megawatts, is that right? Um, like, how are you actually delivering that? Is it just big solar panels? Like, what's the secret to actually scaling up power delivery in space? Do you have batteries on board? Are there other propellants or, or resources for fuel? Or is it all just solar? How are you, how do you actually scale up power delivery in space?

• 2:52:22Speaker 08

  Yeah. So we basically had to reset the entire satellite. We had to go build giant solar arrays. We had to go build giant batteries. We had to build giant primary structures. These things called reaction wheels, which are these large spinning discs that help you point a satellite with large solar arrays.

• 2:52:36John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:52:36Speaker 08

  So like 80% of the satellite we rebuilt from scratch in this factory behind me.

• 2:52:40John Coogan?

  And, and sorry, really quickly, giant solar array that could, in space, that could mean anything from like football fields to

• 2:52:46Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:52:46John Coogan?

  the size of this table, like, just ground me in like order of magnitude, how big are we talking?

• 2:52:50Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the first, the first satellite that we're building that we're launching in three months is 40 meters.

• 2:52:55John Coogan?

  40 meters? Wow, so like, yeah, like halfway down a football field almost, something like that, wow.

• 2:53:01Speaker 08

  It's a space yacht.

• 2:53:02John Coogan?

  Space yacht, yeah.

• 2:53:04Speaker 08

  Exactly, exactly. And then the next one will be 80. So it's gonna be 2X the length, but obviously much more in terms of surface area.

• 2:53:10John Coogan?

  And does that only fit in the Starship fairing? Is that Starship requirement there? Or can you get it up?

• 2:53:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, the first one, the 20 kilowatt is made for Falcon 9. So it'll be, it's made to stack 10 in a Falcon 9. It'll stack, I mean, Starship is so massive, that'll stack 50 in a Starship, which is...

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  If you take the full one, yeah.

• 2:53:28Speaker 08

  Exactly. And then the next one will be made purely for Starship.

• 2:53:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so on the, on the commercial side, from, how, how are the telecom players thinking about the threat from Starlink, right? These are, you know, the big ones are multi-hundred-billion-dollar market cap companies. They have a lot of infrastructure on Earth and, you know, are, from our understanding, like, really feeling the pressure from Starlink. But what is their kind of mental model for Starlink as a threat? And I'm assuming they're paying you to try to catch up.

• 2:53:59Speaker 08

  Exactly. Yeah, I think Starlink came in and basically took a business that had, you know, call it, you'd go like, host like, data at $50 to $100 per megabit per second. And Starlink came in and brought that price under 10, right? So every single player out there had to figure out like, how do I go deploy a lot more capacity? And how do I do it at a low cost? And deploying capacity in space is just all about, how much does it cost me to deploy power, right? If I can deploy more power and I can do so at a lower cost, suddenly I have better unit economics. And so we were the, we were the kind of the path to doing that, right? Which was saying, we're gonna go max out power. So our satellite is as powerful as the billion-dollar satellites that used to exist, but it's not gonna cost a billion. It'll cost 15 million, you can stack 10

• 2:54:43Speaker 08

  per Falcon 9. And that's what it takes to kind of change the game for the telco players. So a bunch of them saw that and were like, okay, like, this, this is actually something we can play around with and, and use. And, and really for us, it's just like the first customer, right? Like, we're all about integrating like the hardware stack for space. We want to max out power. Today, that's for communications. Tomorrow, that's gonna be for compute. And then who knows as we, you know, start becoming like a, a space-faring civilization, like what we'll do with that power later.

• 2:55:08John Coogan?

  Dyson Sphere, Dyson Sphere.

• 2:55:10Jordi Hays?

  So, so this round got done, I'm assuming at a time when people were mocking data centers in space. There's been a little bit of a vibe shift over the last week. And I'm sure all your investors have been hitting you up, sending you every post from...

• 2:55:26John Coogan?

  Have you ever thought about AI competitors?

• 2:55:28Jordi Hays?

  And Gavin.

• 2:55:29John Coogan?

  You gotta see this.

• 2:55:30Jordi Hays?

  I think you gotta, I think you gotta take another look at this.

• 2:55:31John Coogan?

  You should see this Invest Like the Best interview. You should, you should see this.

• 2:55:36Speaker 08

  I promise this isn't a data center round. I had to tell everyone what I was like.

• 2:55:39Jordi Hays?

  No, that's the thing. The data center would be, the data center would be three on, on fifteen.

• 2:55:46Speaker 08

  Yeah. So it was funny. It was in November. Actually, like, you know, Delian has very strong views on this. I was talking to him about it. Early November, late October, we were doing the round and, you know, they, they have a strong opinion. Founder's Fund is right on a lot of things. So like, I don't always want to, I'm not going to say I'm going to take the other side of a bet against them, but it's like, now it's like Founder's Fund on one side, Elon on the other. I'm like, I'm just going to watch and see, see how this plays out. But, but yeah, so our round was primarily on like the, the communications application. It was also on a bunch of the government constellations that we're starting to work on. There's some really interesting things we're doing that the US government is pretty excited about. So more of what you call a conventional. I'm like, yeah, now we'll see what happens with the, with the data center.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Price of the, price of the brick going up.

• 2:56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it is exciting. As, as a CEO, like, it is somewhat your job to bring energy to what you're building and bring excitement to what you're building. And if there's an opportunity, even if it's five, 10 years off, if you're going to be a beneficiary of that trend, you do sort of have a responsibility to raise your hand and say, yeah, hey, it's logical. It's some of the value will accrue here to me if that's the case. But you probably also don't want to whiplash everyone and be like, actually, I've been doing this the whole time. So, yeah.

• 2:56:58Jordi Hays?

  Any, any predictions on just how big some of these commercial satellites will get over the next decade? I mean, I saw somebody on, on the timeline earlier talking about how in order to recreate, you know, one gigawatt of, of sort of, of compute capacity in orbit, you need something like 10,000 satellites, but eventually you could just have one, you know, data center sized satellite floating out. But, but how, how do you think about size versus, and, and just like massive individual satellites versus constellation, the more constellation approach?

• 2:57:37Speaker 08

  Yeah. I, I'm in the school of thought of constellations, right? Like, I think we're going to build really big satellites that still exist in constellations. I think compute's going to be distributed, right? Compute and communications are going to be all part of the same distributed network, right? So, so our, our bigger satellite, Giga, is going to be like the length of, you know, of a football field, right?

• 2:57:54John Coogan?

  What's it called?

• 2:57:55Jordi Hays?

  It's called Giga?

• 2:57:56Speaker 08

  It's called the Giga.

• 2:57:57Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for Giga.

• 2:58:01John Coogan?

  Best name for a satellite I've ever heard. It's incredible name for a satellite.

• 2:58:06Jordi Hays?

  We are very critical of names. Sometimes people come on and they they name their companies things that don't are not necessarily.

• 2:58:15John Coogan?

  Hubris.ai.

• 2:58:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, hubris.ai.

• 2:58:17John Coogan?

  Raises $5 billion seed round. What's gonna happen? Who knows? Giga is a fantastic name.

• 2:58:25Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 2:58:26Jordi Hays?

  Giga would be a beautiful name for a satellite. I'm glad you're doing it.

• 2:58:29John Coogan?

  I'm very excited to see it.

• 2:58:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, uh, very exciting. Congrats to the whole team and, uh, yeah, hoping hoping we can partner at some point to put a TBPN satellite up in space.

• 2:58:40John Coogan?

  We need one for sure.

• 2:58:41Jordi Hays?

  We definitely will need one at some point.

• 2:58:43John Coogan?

  One last question from my side. Uh, take us through a little bit of a tour of what's behind you. Uh, is this the only facility? How big is this facility? What's actually happening here? Are satellites getting, uh, built out?

• 2:58:56Speaker 08

  This is a 180,000 square foot factory, right? Where, uh, basically you'll see the start of a manufacturing line coming down here. That's going to, can't really see it in the view, but the clean room's over there with the satellite actually in it that's about to launch in three months.

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. You you even have a huge signs up. It says primary structure, side sections, uh, final integration. Wow. Physical divides. That's amazing.

• 2:59:17Speaker 08

  Yeah. So, so, so, yeah, we're basically scaling up now. We're 11 months in, but a large part of this round that we're raising is to is to go scale up mass production. Go from one this year to 10 next year to 30 the following year.

• 2:59:27John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:59:28Speaker 08

  Um, and it's really all about scale at this point, right? Like, let's get the first one to work in three months and then let's do it many more times over the coming 24 months.

• 2:59:35John Coogan?

  And also, is the company's name a nod to your initials?

• 2:59:39Speaker 08

  Yeah. So here's the thing, like, uh, is that people think it's about my initials and it's like, that is the most egotistical thing in the world. I promise you that is not the case. Uh, so, you know, my brother and I started this company. We're starting a company with your brother is like the coolest thing in the world to do. We're both conjurers, but it comes back to the card shop, right? Like helping humanity become a type two card shop civilization, K2. The whole thesis is like build bigger, right? And our logo is a big Dyson sphere. I heard you mention that, right? And so it's like, our whole thesis was like, let's start laying the groundwork to helping humanity become a type two card shop civilization. So let's call the company K2.

• 3:00:14Jordi Hays?

  You understand naming. I'm gonna, I have to, I, the, uh, we, we, we, we had a, we had a company on, uh, uh, called Icarus. Icarus Space. We were a little bit worried about that.

• 3:00:25John Coogan?

  For what it's worth, it crack, insanely good team over there. And I really hope, maybe they'll be brands.

• 3:00:29Jordi Hays?

  Very cool, very cool idea, but, uh, they're playing with, playing with.

• 3:00:31John Coogan?

  They're playing with fire.

• 3:00:33Speaker 08

  That name is playing with fire. They're a super cool team now.

• 3:00:35John Coogan?

  They are, they are very cool. They're, they're very cool. Uh, but there's been, there's been a rash of, of hilariously named companies.

• 3:00:41Jordi Hays?

  That's playing on hard mode. That's playing on hard mode.

• 3:00:44John Coogan?

  Playing on hard mode. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 3:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you and, uh, congratulations to the whole team.

• 3:00:49John Coogan?

  Massive.

• 3:00:50Speaker 08

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

• 3:00:51John Coogan?

  Coffers are full. We'll see you soon. Um, well, that essentially.

• 3:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's rip some timeline. I, I.

• 3:00:59John Coogan?

  Let's rip some timeline. Okay. I want to watch this video of a hillside in China that has been covered with solar panels. When you see this video, do you react with admiration or with disgust? Tyler's nodding.

• 3:01:09Jordi Hays?

  This is sick.

• 3:01:10John Coogan?

  This is sick. Is this AI or is this real? Do we know?

• 3:01:13Jordi Hays?

  I hope it's real.

• 3:01:14John Coogan?

  I can't tell, so.

• 3:01:15Jordi Hays?

  This is Casey Hanmer's dream.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  This is Casey Hanmer's dream. I hope this is a lot of, this, this looks pretty real. I was watching a video of somebody, there, there's a whole trend on TikTok of people throwing tires, the longest tire throw. So, cause if you throw a tire off a mountain, it will just spin all the way down to the bottom. So you can throw a tire for like miles and miles and miles. Uh, it's a great, it's a great, uh, content genre.

• 3:01:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. For some reason, solar panels over mountains, do you give me a little bit of disgust? Whereas I, I get it. I, I'm, I'm less.

• 3:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, mountains are beautiful.

• 3:01:46Jordi Hays?

  Deserts, deserts. I'm like, blanket it. Blanket it.

• 3:01:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's sort of already.

• 3:01:52Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, this looks like a, like it would be a really enjoyable mountain range to just go on a nice little hike. And so I'm, uh, I'm feeling the disgust.

• 3:02:02John Coogan?

  You're feeling the disgust.

• 3:02:02Jordi Hays?

  But also impressed.

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:04Jordi Hays?

  By the scale.

• 3:02:05John Coogan?

  It's just crazy that like, but there was no desert between these mountains and who they needed to get power to, you know? Like, cause I don't know, there must be people like right there, living in the foothills or something and they need to put them in the mountains. I don't know. I mean, at least the mountains won't catch on fire. You know, that's often a problem.

• 3:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I'm curious around the efficiency because just given the movement of the sun, are you going to have like there, it's actually blanketing both sides of these peaks. So wouldn't this, not this, you would, you would think that finding a area nearby that was flat would be more efficient, but.

• 3:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Who knows? Snapchat is

• 3:02:44John Coogan?

  Anyone from Snapchat coming on the show soon?

• 3:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Making money. They are, let's see here. Base16Z says Snapchat plus user growth pretty much guaranteed to reaccelerate with the new storage charges. So they're saying you've saved 4,122 memories since 2017. You've used 16 gigabytes of your 5 gigabyte of free storage limit. We'll temporarily back up new memories that exceed your limit for up to 12 months. Or you can join Snapchat Plus and get your 250 gigabytes. So anyways, makes sense that Snap is trying to make more money.

• 3:03:29John Coogan?

  That's good news. I'm surprised that they haven't done any sort of big AI content licensing deal. And of course, they have a deal with perplexity to bring AI into the Snapchat product. But does Snapchat just not have any data that would be surfaced in an LLM? Like Reddit seems to have done such a good job with that, but I guess people aren't really reviewing things or discussing things in text-based formats on Snapchat. It's all kind of just day in the life content. Anyway, what else is going on?

• 3:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Trump says

• 3:04:04Speaker 02

  Here, Jordy, you want to go first?

• 3:04:06Jordi Hays?

  As I said, Trump says doesn't see why we can't have 20% or 25% GDP growth. Says the market should continue to go up with great results.

• 3:04:16John Coogan?

  I mean, don't see why we can't have 20% GDP growth? Because it's like never happened in history, maybe? I don't know.

• 3:04:26Jordi Hays?

  What was China?

• 3:04:27John Coogan?

  He is AGI-pilled. That's extremely AGI-pilled.

• 3:04:30Speaker 02

  Dorkesh has talked about this.

• 3:04:32John Coogan?

  Dorkesh literally has talked about this. 25% GDP growth, the first AGI-pilled president, I suppose. Let's head over to the

• 3:04:40Jordi Hays?

  Apparently China hit 19.3% in 1970.

• 3:04:44John Coogan?

  Okay. Is that the great thing forward or something?

• 3:04:47Jordi Hays?

  More recently, more recently, 14% in 2007, so.

• 3:04:54Speaker 02

  I think Trump's looking at the data.

• 3:04:55John Coogan?

  Great leap forward was 1960 ish. Tyler, what you got?

• 3:05:00Speaker 02

  Okay, so you guys gave me a month to write new jokes, but I already wrote some.

• 3:05:05John Coogan?

  Oh, you got one?

• 3:05:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So these were, I did use LM to help, but these are not, never before seen.

• 3:05:10John Coogan?

  Never before seen by the trainings. Get them in the next free track.

• 3:05:13Speaker 02

  Did you search them in Google to make sure that? Yeah, yeah. Yes. I looked them up. These are, these are branded. The chat's gonna verify and I don't want you to get exposed. Okay, first one, ready? Okay. You're telling me Jerry rigged this car?

• 3:05:27John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 3:05:28Speaker 02

  Is that Jerry rigged?

• 3:05:29John Coogan?

  Jerry rigged car? That's pretty good. That's, but that's sort of like the point.

• 3:05:34Speaker 02

  But it's not a guy named Jerry. You're telling me my friend Jerry rigged this car?

• 3:05:38John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. But it's, it's, it's pretty good, pretty good, pretty good.

• 3:05:42Speaker 02

  Okay, second one. You're telling me a brain washed this cult?

• 3:05:47John Coogan?

  Oh, that's really good. Oh, yes. That is novel. There we go. That is a great one. You're telling me a brain washed this cult? You need to tweet that right now because that's 100K likes right there, 10K likes. That's very good.

• 3:06:03Speaker 02

  Okay, I got, I got, I got two more. You're telling me a star crossed these lovers?

• 3:06:09John Coogan?

  That's sort of literal. That's sort of like what it is. That's sort of what it is, yes.

• 3:06:14Speaker 02

  Okay, you're telling me a tongue tied this boy?

• 3:06:22John Coogan?

  You gotta post all four of those and see, and, and I would predict that, that the brain washed cult does number one, does numbers. The tongue tied boy also does decent numbers and the other two flop.

• 3:06:35Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll, I'll tweet them now and then we'll see tomorrow.

• 3:06:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that, yeah, that's a great, that's a great test.

• 3:06:40Speaker 02

  Well done, well done. We gave you a month.

• 3:06:42John Coogan?

  Brainwashed cult is, that is novel. That is novel. And that, that's not coming from, from any of the LLM, so. Oh, the shrimp fried rice bench is really, really good. Uh, let's go over to Rune. He says, "Everyone will go public soon because they finally feel the heat of a well, of well-capitalized competition. The wrath of Nyan. Uh, there was no reason to seek enormous amounts of capital. Until recently, we will see natural interest rates north of 3% and the end of secular stagnation. Everyone's going public." Oh, in other news, Eleven Labs partnering with Meta to power expressive, scalable audio across Instagram, Horizon, and more, bringing natural and diverse audio to billions of users. Also, you got the founder of Eleven Labs on the cover of Forbes. Look at-

• 3:07:26Jordi Hays?

  Look at that smile. Look at that smile.

• 3:07:28John Coogan?

  GigaChad Filter, engaged.

• 3:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes. Not beating the GigaChad Filter allegations.

• 3:07:33John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. No, he, I mean, Forbes headshot photographers, it's a great, great product. This is, this is something that's very special. Uh, so congratulations to Matty over at Eleven Labs.

• 3:07:45Jordi Hays?

  And the whole team.

• 3:07:46John Coogan?

  Making the cover of Forbes. That's a huge moment, uh, for, for him and the whole team.

• 3:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, speaking of AI.

• 3:07:53John Coogan?

  Presidential AI Challenge?

• 3:07:55Jordi Hays?

  First Lady Melania Trump is introducing the Presidential AI Challenge. Artificial intelligence is America's next competitive edge, driving advancements in your career, supporting your family, and strengthening your community. Sure, no one will disagree with any of that. Uh, "This is why I launched the Presidential AI Challenge, a nationwide call to students and educators to shape America's future. Teams from all 50 states have already registered. Shape the future. Be part of the Presidential AI Challenge today." What is the Presidential AI Challenge?

• 3:08:27John Coogan?

  It's a good question. Um-

• 3:08:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, "The Presidential AI Challenge will foster interest and expertise in AI in America's use. Early training in the responsible use of AI tools will demystify this technology and prepare-

• 3:08:41John Coogan?

  I think this might be the challenge. I think the challenge might be-

• 3:08:43Jordi Hays?

  To understand the Presidential AI Challenge?

• 3:08:46John Coogan?

  It's like a, it's a riddle. This is a riddle. I think it's a, I think it's some, it's some sort of like, you know, it's shrouded in mystery. That's the whole goal, to, to test the American people. Can they understand what it is?

• 3:09:01Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I, I, I think I've figured it out. So there's elementary school, middle school, high school.

• 3:09:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:09:07Jordi Hays?

  And there's challenge projects that groups of students will be able to participate in, as well as awards and prizes. Hopefully, solid gold, solid gold trophies.

• 3:09:21John Coogan?

  Massive trophies.

• 3:09:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:24John Coogan?

  Statues.

• 3:09:25Jordi Hays?

  I wanna see, I wanna see the comically large checkbook come out to, you know, for the winners.

• 3:09:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:31Jordi Hays?

  Maybe grants to schools.

• 3:09:32John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe the exact projects haven't been, like, you know, released.

• 3:09:38Jordi Hays?

  There actually is a cash prize.

• 3:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Ten thousand dollars per team.

• 3:09:42John Coogan?

  Wait, is it Peyton Melania coin, or Trump coin, or US dollar?

• 3:09:45Jordi Hays?

  I think the.

• 3:09:46John Coogan?

  Or gold, or gold.

• 3:09:47Speaker 02

  I think you mean Trump meme.

• 3:09:48John Coogan?

  Trump meme, that's right, it's not Trump coin. Get it right, it's Trump meme. It's the best. Okay, here's some questions.

• 3:09:56Jordi Hays?

  You also win cloud credits, that's so.

• 3:09:58John Coogan?

  You do? Okay, that's actually amazing, I love that.

• 3:10:00Jordi Hays?

  Presidential award certificate, so boom certificate, you're getting cloud credits. You're getting ten thousand for your school, homeschool or community group. And you're getting ten thousand dollars per team member in the middle school category, and the high school category, and the educator category.

• 3:10:15John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 3:10:16Jordi Hays?

  So, I mean, who, Tyler, you, I guess, there's no call, no college tier.

• 3:10:24John Coogan?

  Too old.

• 3:10:24Jordi Hays?

  So you have to go back to school and participate and win.

• 3:10:27John Coogan?

  Get a fake ID that says you're thirteen.

• 3:10:31Jordi Hays?

  Just to go back and dominate the presidential AI challenge?

• 3:10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's exciting. Good luck to everyone.

• 3:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Is the presidential fitness challenge back?

• 3:10:42John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 3:10:42Jordi Hays?

  Did that get a?

• 3:10:43John Coogan?

  It has to be back.

• 3:10:44Jordi Hays?

  Did that?

• 3:10:45John Coogan?

  They're putting gyms in airports, of course, of course. You're gonna have to run a mile if you're an American kid.

• 3:10:51Jordi Hays?

  According.

• 3:10:52John Coogan?

  The first, wait, wait, wait, I didn't see this. The first child was born in a Waymo?

• 3:10:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, according to Avital.

• 3:10:59John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 3:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Says Lisan Al-Ghaib.

• 3:11:02John Coogan?

  I mean, that is, you are truly the, the puppeteer of the silicon intelligence, if you're born in a Waymo. You merely adopted the Waymo, I was born in it.

• 3:11:14Jordi Hays?

  That is truly the most 2025 story.

• 3:11:17John Coogan?

  You merely adopted artificial intelligence. I was, I was born in a way, born, being born in a way. I mean, being born in a taxi cab is like a classic thing. That's like, that's like been, you know, described for years, but uh, Sagar and Jetty is coming on the show on Friday. He says, I guess that's tomorrow. Uh, he says on H200, the pro selling to China theory relies on it being good for US interests to keep China on the US technology tree and forestalling Huawei. In my opinion, this ignores the singular flavor of US biz relationship with China since P N T R. In every case, the US companies came, became intertwined with China. They became less favorable to US interests and more malleable tools of the US, of the, of the Chinese state. And so

• 3:12:00John Coogan?

  he is, uh, he's bearish on the H200 plan, but we will dig into it all with him tomorrow. In other news, Kay, uh, Kesar Yunus, the CEO of Applied Intelligence, um, is on the timeline. He's joined X. He says, after 16 years and 10 months, sitting on a fantastic handle, uh, he says, I'm finally writing my first X. Also, we'll start writing more regularly. This, my first post is ironically on why I'm posting. And so he shares a link to a blog post and Ryan Peterson says, welcome, brother. But also writing a long form blog post is not being on X, lol, which is very funny.

• 3:12:42Jordi Hays?

  On the blog post, he says, after many years of railing against going on X, I'm finally pulling the Band-Aid and getting on the platform. Historically, if you've watched my talks, you've heard me say that one of the keys to applied success is focus. And I'm often demonized. I've, I've often demonized social media, specifically X, as wasteful and distracting. It encourages superficiality, showmanship, and the wrong values of a real substance. Quote, well, well, well, how the turntables. Some of that is still true, but as a company has grown, the balance has changed. The value of having a microphone now outweighs the downsides. So I'm going to try this. So glad that he is posting. Let's hit the gong.

• 3:13:19John Coogan?

  Let's hit the gong for him and then, uh, we gotta do the sales part.

• 3:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Before Salesforce, I want to say congratulations to Shergiel Ozer. He is the founder of General Agents. He launched his product on April 2nd and was acquired by Jeff Bezos.

• 3:13:46Jordi Hays?

  Very, very exciting. Congrats to the General Agents team.

• 3:13:50John Coogan?

  Give me the Benioff numbers.

• 3:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Benioff numbers.

• 3:13:53John Coogan?

  How much is he making on AI?

• 3:13:54Jordi Hays?

  According to Tane, Salesforce says their Agent Force ARR is now 540 million.

• 3:14:02Jordi Hays?

  4.3x year over year.

• 3:14:06John Coogan?

  Congratulations to Mark Benioff.

• 3:14:08Jordi Hays?

  This is why he might be renaming the company Agent Force. We will see. We will see. And, closing it out.

• 3:14:19John Coogan?

  One more?

• 3:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Jason says, "The original Omega Speedmaster 29151 is one of the best-looking watches of all time, and this is a particularly good-looking example from 1958. Hairspring knows how to shoot a watch." And it is stunning. Stunning. Stunning silhouette.

• 3:14:40John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for tuning in. Have a great rest of your day. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Please do.

• 3:14:49John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day and Merry Christmas. Goodbye.

• 3:14:53Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in. Cheers.